The Longest Nite

Um fa

Hong Kong

1998

81 Min

Color

2.35:1

Cantonese

Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
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PROD Johnnie To, Wai Ka Fai, Catherine Chan

SCR Yau Nai Hoi, Szeto Kam-Yuen

CAST Lau Ching Wan, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Maggie Siu, Lo Hoi-Pang, Fong Lung

PROD DES Simon So, Patrick Tsui

While a gang war is developing in Macau between two heads of Triads, corrupt cop Sam (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) takes on a gunman in a restaurant where bald Tony (Lau Ching-Wan) is eating. After Sam goes to another mobster’s restaurant where an informant is tortured, he finds a headless corpse in his apartment. Then a nightclub owner is murdered, and Sam moves fast to find the killer in an effort to prevent the gang war from escalating. However, he gets a full dose of action after he pins the crime on Tony. —wikipedia

Director

Johnnie To

Following his directorial debut with the 1980 period martial arts fantasy The Enigmatic Case, To’s career came to something of an apex in the late 1980s thanks to such memorable action films as The Big Heat and tender, personal dramas like All About Ah-Long (the latter of which landed star Chow Yun-Fat a Best Actor award at the 1990 Hong Kong Film Awards). After taking the helm for such memorable action films as The Heroic Trio and directing Stephen Chow in such films as Justice, My Foot and Mad Monk in the early ‘90s, To moved into producing with the creation of independent film company Milky Way Films, a company which yielded such popular Hong Kong action efforts as Nai-hoi Yau’s The Longest Nite and Expect the Unexpected. Though To’s production company was indeed a success, his career behind the camera was in need of some rejuvenation, an issue which he readily addressed with the release of his highly praised 1999 crime drama The Mission.

Utilizing convention as a springboard… read more

Utilizing convention as a springboard to explore new territories of characterization in the well-worn crime genre, To breathed new life into Hong Kong cinema and began to gain international attention thanks to such efforts as The Mission and the outrageous 2001 action thriller Fulltime Killer. Despite the fact that To excelled at action films, it wasn’t all about the gunplay. Such projects as the lightweight New Year’s comedy Fat Choi Spirit and the supernatural comedy My Left Eye Sees Ghosts proved without a doubt that he was equally adept at getting laughs from fun-loving filmgoers. It was during this period that To began to develop fruitful professional relationships with such talents as director Wai Ka-Fai and actor Andy Lau. After exploring the effects of karma among the musclebound set in the bizarre but effective 2003 action thriller Running on Karma (the film which served as the seventh collaboration between To and Lau), the director explored the effects of media violence on the public in the fast-paced action thriller Breaking News.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:119050)

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CJ Roy

15Jan13

Incredibly schizophrenic film, bounces regularly from awful gags and bland shot selection to some of the best work in the Milkyway canon. Essential viewing for any fan of Johnnie To. You can not only sharpen your eye and play a fun game of what sequences are To's but bear witness to what is likely the formal birth of the To we know and love. In short, Longest Nite is the birth of a revolutionary.

Adam Cook

11Jan13

It doesn't work as a cohesive whole and is occasionally confusing tonally, but this contains some of To's most astonishing expressive flourishes (the climax is the Hong Kong action version of the climax of Lady From Shanghai). This is merely a guess, but it feels as though To, free of being officially attached to the film, took more chances outside of his stylistic identity that would influence his later films.

A.J. Cloutier and 3 others like this

CJ Roy, Jack Lehtonen, HKFanatic