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Ringo Lam, Director of City on Fire, Dies

Hong Kong director Ringo Lam was found dead in bed at his home on Saturday afternoon by his wife. An ambulance was called and paramedics failed to revive him. Police found nothing suspicious. Lam was 63.

Ringo Lam, Director of City on Fire, Dies
May S. Young from Metro NYC, United States [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The South China Morning Post reported that Lam had been suffering from the flu and was taking medication against doctor's advice.

Ringo Lam Ling Tung was one of the key action and thriller directors of the Golden Age of Hong Kong movies of the 1980s and early 1990s. City on Fire, his 1987 undercover cop thriller with Chow Yun Fat, remains his most famous movie with international cineastes. It was a major influence on Quentin Tarantino, who lifted its plot wholesale for Reservoir Dogs.

Lam began in the Hong Kong Film and Television industry through acting classes  in the early 1970s where he met Chow Yun Fat. His collaborations with Chow included some of the most interesting roles in Chow's career. Chow played an inmate in Prison on Fire and its sequel Prison on Fire 2. He also played a cop protecting a child witness in Wild Search, a plot partly influenced by Witness which featured a climactic fight scene where Chow Yun Fat was set on fire!

Lam's movies were often recognizable by his expertise in choreographing action and a noirish, pessimistic view of human nature. His heroes were often flawed and tortured in the way noir heroes were, which lent his movies a gritty, grounded nature. His closest Hollywood equivalent would have been William Friedkin, who made The Exorcist, The French Connection and To Live and Die in L.A.

Lam directed over 20 movies between 1983 and 2016. His genre of choice was usually urban thrillers, though he made a rare and surprising venture into period martial arts with the Tsui Hark-produced Burning Paradise in 1994. It was a darker and more noirish take on the genre than most audiences would have expected. His last collaboration with Chow Yun Fat was the over-the-top thriller Full Contact from 1992, a berserk thriller that felt like a combination of Jim Thompson and John Woo. An ultraviolent tale of double-crosses and crazed gunfights, Chow Yun Fat plays an outlaw with a code battling Simon Yam's gay psychopath who lusts after him. It ends with Chow killing off Yam with the immortal line "Go masturbate in Hell!" As one does.

Lam also made three movies with Jean-Claude Van Damme: the noir thriller Maximum Risk (1996) co-starring Natasha Henstridge, the Sci Fi thriller Replicant (2001) and the prison fight thriller In Hell (2003). These were some of Van Damme's more interesting movies, each with Lam's characteristic noir vibe that gave Van Damme got a chance to play more nuanced and complex characters than most of his other movies. Van Damme tweeted:

https://twitter.com/JCVD/status/1079105825178877953

Lam dropped out of filmmaking in 2007 after directing a segment in the portmanteau thriller Triangle, with the other segments directed by Tsui Hark and Johnnie To. In 2015, he made a comeback with Wild City, a noir thriller about an ex-cop protecting a Mainland Chinese woman from a corrupt businessman and gangsters. It wasn't as intense as his best movies from the 80s and 90s but nonetheless a welcome return.

In 2015, the New York Asian Film Festival gave Lam the Lifetime Achievement Award in acknowledgment of his contributions to Cinema.

His last movie was Sky on Fire, which was released in 2016 and starred Daniel Wu, who now stars in AMC's Into the Badlands.

Lam told the South China Morning Post, "I am at an age where I have something to say about life. What is life? There's nothing that I can do to decide when it ends. I am powerless and I am very angry, so I put that all onto the screen."


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Adi TantimedhAbout Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh is a filmmaker, screenwriter and novelist who just likes to writer. He wrote radio plays for the BBC Radio, “JLA: Age of Wonder” for DC Comics, “Blackshirt” for Moonstone Books, and “La Muse” for Big Head Press. Most recently, he wrote “Her Nightly Embrace”, “Her Beautiful Monster” and “Her Fugitive Heart”, a trilogy of novels featuring a British-Indian private eye published by Atria Books, a division Simon & Schuster.
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