Wong Kar-Wai got his first shot at the director’s chair with this stylish, cheesy Hong Kong mix between “Mean Streets” and the sympathetic gangster popularity of “A Better Tomorrow”, and it bears some visual inventiveness that would mark his later works, but not much else. Andy Lau is a hotshot underworld figure whose best friend, Jacky Cheung, is a constant screw-up and the laughingstock of the gangster scene; when Jacky runs afoul of a fellow Big Brother, an interdepartmental struggle ensues. Also, beautiful Maggie Cheung is around to add romance for Lau as a distant visiting cousin. The melodrama is thick and the soundtrack is bubbling with gaudy synthesizers and over-the-top emotional cues, but even in a jumbled gangster film Wai has a knack for holding attention, and he gets most of it in the editing.
