A Legendary Hong Kong Director’s First Crime Thriller is A Forgotten Cult Gem
Johnnie To may have just been a hired hand for The Big Heat, but you can see the seeds of his best work in the 1988 film.
For a director so celebrated for his masterful urban crime thrillers, in which contemplations on brotherhood and fate are inextricable from violent cop-versus-crook setpieces, it’s a surprise to discover that Johnnie To wasn’t all that interested in making action films to begin with. “It was [producer] Tsui Hark’s fault,” To said of The Big Heat (1988), the first of his many films in that genre. “He told me to do it.”
With this actioner, in which a cop on the verge of retirement must investigate the murder of his former partner, the prolific director had found the cinematic avenue he would keep returning to over the next three decades. But the road to it was a long and bumpy one. To’s debut feature, the wuxia film The Enigmatic Case (1980), was deemed a commercial failure, after which he shifted to television for the next six years, working on miniseries adapted from martial arts novels. A few comedies followed, including a reworking of Billy Wilder’s 1955 rom-com The Seven Year Itch. He was just one of “many, many directors” who worked on The Big Heat, and exited the project before it had even finished, citing a difficult working relationship with Hark, whose instructions were unclear and he, hard to please.
The Big Heat marries its straightforward premise with striking visuals, the most memorable of which is a tense nighttime shootout sequence in an alleyway, with both characters and location lit in contrasting shades of red and blue. A new 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray facilitates a visit to this seedier side of Hong Kong as envisioned by To, where a waterfront locale becomes the setting for an offered bribe and even the film’s most domestic environments — a kitchen, a living room, a grocery store — are backdrops of cruelty and grief.
How Was The Big Heat Received Upon Release?
Not well. In The Cinema Of Tsui Hark, author Lisa Morton called the film “a minor box office disappointment.” Its budget isn’t public information, but with a box-office total of $4.76 million, it was only the 94th-highest-grossing film in Hong Kong that year.
Why Is The Big Heat Important to See Now?
The Big Heat plays out as a kinetic cat-and-mouse game in which the criminals are ingenious, the police stoop to morally reprehensible schemes in their desperation for answers, and there’s a sweeping grief as the bodies pile up. Despite To being a hired hand, and sharing a directing credit with Andrew Kam, a retrospective look at the film is illuminating as a blueprint for the action cinema he’d come to be associated with, and the thematic preoccupations across his filmography.
The thriller is punctuated by bursts of graphic bloodshed, which author Stephen Teo describes as verging on the slasher sensibilities of Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper in his book, Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film. The Big Heat’s opening dream sequence features a rotating electric drill piercing an open palm. Early on, a man is set on fire and then rammed into by a car, the force of which knocks him backwards into petrol barrels and causes an explosion. One criminal is decapitated, while another’s handgun explodes, sending his fingers flying. A third is split in half by an elevator cable. Though such gore recurs in To’s later films, it’s sparse; he instead focuses on a more grounded, realistic brutality.
Johnnie To’s first Hong Kong action flick is largely forgotten.
The Big Heat also establishes the director’s knack for leveraging a hospital’s inherent high stakes. In this film, there are surreptitious stabbings, staff uniforms worn to disguise murderous intent, and IV drips that aren’t as innocuous as their labels make them appear. A gunfight in a hospital corridor carries over to a tussle on the staircase, then to a makeshift hideout in the cavernous depths of an elevator shaft lit entirely in blue. To would later use a hospital setting to stage chase sequences and assassination attempts (A Hero Never Dies), eventually building up to 2016’s Three, an action film set almost entirely inside a hospital as a neurosurgeon, a criminal and a police inspector engage in a stand-off.
In being afflicted by a nerve issue that causes his hand to spasm periodically, The Big Heat’s inspector John Wong (Waise Lee) joins a club populated by other grievously ill To protagonists. This includes the former judo champion of Throw Down (2004), whose vision is deteriorating, and the cop of Loving You (1995), who suffers a brain injury after being shot in the head.
What New Features Does The Big Heat Blu-ray Have?
From Shout! Studios’ Hong Kong Cinema Classics label, which restores the region’s iconic action films, features on the two-disc set include:
Disc One (4K UHD):
- A new 4K scan from the original camera negative presented in Dolby Vision
- Optional English subtitles newly translated for this release
- New audio commentary with author and critic David West
Disc Two (Blu-ray):
- A new 4K scan from the original camera negative
- Optional English subtitles newly translated for this release
- New audio commentary with author and critic David West
- Big Shot! - An interview with actor Waise Lee
- The Heat Is On - An interview with academic Gilbert Po
- Hot In Hong Kong - An interview with critic James Mudge
- The film’s theatrical trailer
