Odd Man Out
lau Ho-leung tones down the bluster for the lastest chinese war thriller, this time set in little ol’ hong Kong.
Against All Odds
Director: Lau Ho-leung • Writers: Lau Ho-leung, Frankie Tam, Ashley Cheung, Ryan Ling
Starring: Han Geng, Mitchell Hoog, Chen Yongsheng, Louise Wong, Han Mo
China • 1hr 48mins
Opens Hong Kong November 13 • IIB
Grade: B
Near the end of the Second World War, 1944 to be precise, an American Flying Tigers bomber squadron pilot gets shot down during a mission over Kai Tak, then an airstrip, in Japanese occupied Hong Kong. A Dongjiang Column resistance cell led by Dan (Philip Ng Wan-lung) and including Gutsy (Chen Yongsheng), Sister 3 (Louise Wong Dan-ni) and Mimi (Han Mo), is tasked by their superiors to rescue the captured pilot, James Harnett (Mitchell Hoog, The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It) from a Japanese stronghold in Wanchai: a bowling alley. Okay. Meanwhile, Shanghai-based undercover operative Smiley (Han Geng) pops down with orders to assassinate high ranking Japanese officer Ichijo (Soji Arai, Dongji Rescue) – at the very same bowling alley. The two missions collide, and the three loosely connected allies become a single force to fuck up the Japanese Imperial Army, at least a little bit.
Make no mistake. Veteran writer (Warriors of Future) and director Lau Ho-leung’s Against All Odds | 營救飛虎 is a Chinese production, one that pivots on the tension between China and Japan, that’s designed to slot nicely as a companion piece to the more bombastic, jingoistic string of war epics of recent years. That said, Lau and co-writers Frankie Tam Gong-yuen (The Sparring Partner), Ashley Cheung Yin-kei (One Second Champion) and Ryan Ling Wai-chun (The Moon Thieves) tap one of those lost true stories of the Pacific War effort for an old-fashioned wartime actioner that’s appealing for how close to home it lands.
Sacrifice is written all over him
Harnett is shot down by a psychopath (all Japanese are psychopaths in these movies) of a pilot, Igarashi (Joey Iwanaga), and taken to the bowling alley as a prize to be presented to an even higher ranking dude by Ichijo in a few days. So when the Dongjiang troop springs him – he’s an important asset – it’s critical that Ichijo get him back and he rustles up all his resources to do so – including Igarashi. As it turns out, Harnett saw what looked like a Japanese radio tower on the Lion Rock, so despite Smiley getting his cover blown in the bowling alley melee, he joins Dan and Co. on a new mission, to find Harnett’s downed fighter, retrieve its camera and secure the evidence of the tower.
Against All Odds adheres to most war drama precepts: The good guys are unimpeachable, each has an intensely personal reason for joinging the resistance beyond the fact it’s right, some or all of our heroes are going to die serving the greater good. The film doesn’t aim for the ambitious pomp of The Eight Hundred or outsized adventure of Dongji, instead it wins points on intimacy and the much smaller scale of Hong Kong. Everything in Hong Kong is small scale, and by leaning into that Lau raises the stakes on a personal level; by shifting the focus to the people the film becomes about more than just the radio tower.
The focus on the characters means the cast has to do the heavy lifting, and for the most part they rise to the task. Han gives Smiley a palpable sense of fatigue and fear that he’s been playing at collaborator too long. Ng is mostly stoic and driven as Dan but Wong is the right amount of fiery grief as Sister 3 – the shaved head (when she rips off her wig in the bowling alley she delivers strong Okoye energy) and flamethrower help. But Lau creates a vivid sense of place, effectively and logically mixing languages for a change and peppers the story with some good action set pieces – the bowling alley clusterfuck, retrieving the camera (though it makes Harnett look like a bit of an idiot), slipping past a Japanese patrol boat in the harbour among them. The writers even find a minute to interrogate the cost of war and duty a tiny bit by giving Harnett has a moment of guilt when Dan, Smiley et al sneak over to Hung Hom and he sees the wreckage of his mis-targeted bombing raid. In another economic film environment Against All Odds is a modest mid-budget curio that coasts on its “Holy shit, really?” story, solid if not spectacular production and timeless idea that resistance isn’t futile.