The Adventurers 
大冒險家 「Daimouhimga」
Release Date: August 02nd, 1995
Duration: 119 mins.
Director: Ringo Lam
Writer: Sandy Shaw, Ringo Lam, Kwong-yam Yip (Screenplay),
Starring: Andy Lay (Mandy/Wai), Rosamund Kwan (Mona), Chien-Lien Wu (Crystal Lui), Paul Chun (Ray Lui),
School on Fire (1988) is probably Ringo Lam’s best work, what with its potent social commentary on Triad corruption of high school kids being packaged in a grim crime drama with an explosive ending. His most famous might be City on Fire (1987), the Heroic Bloodshed film that inspired Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Then there’s Full Contact (1992), with camerawork so ostentatiously eye-catching some suspect it informed The Matrix. Keeping in with that Hollywood theme is Burning Paradise (1994), which is Lam’s Temple of Doom. Perhaps his most political is Full Alert (1997), a bleak crime thriller where HK cops and take on Mainland Chinese robbers on the eve of the hand over of the island and everyone ends up dead or disillusioned. All are great but for my money, his most re-watchable and entertaining is The Adventurers, the 1995 film that slots in between the last two of the aforementioned works.
The Adventurers is a globetrotting adventure with a potboiler plot that stars Hong Kong heart-throb Andy Lau. The film manages to balance action spectacle and character-driven story pretty well but benefits most from Lam’s canny casting of two frequent Lau co-stars, Rosamund Kwan and Jacklyn Wu.
The story begins with a farming family in 1970s Cambodia who are murdered by Communist forces led by Ray Lui (Paul Chun). Everyone except the son dies and he is taken in by a family friend and raised in Thailand.
Flash-forward 20 years, he is now a fighter pilot with the name Wai (Andy Lau) who, when he discovers Lui, now a big-time arms dealer trying to buy off a Thai general, wants revenge and makes an assassination attempt only to get shot in the fracas after Lui uses his wife, Mona (Rosamund Kwan), as a human shield and a bodyguard gets a shot off. More serious than the bullet are the feelings Wai catches when he locks eyes with the gangster’s moll and she dresses his wound and assists his escape, citing her hatred of Lui as the reason for betrayal.
Already there’s enough story here to furnish a tight thriller but Lam is operating on a grander stage and sends Wai to San Francisco where he is recruited by the CIA to infiltrate Lui’s Chinatown operations. Wai’s way in is through Lui’s daughter, Crystal (Jacklyn Wu), an art student in miserable State-side exile from the father she hates. Wai wins her over by rescuing her from kidnappers in a reverse kidnap that goes awry as the two go on the lam from murderous mobsters out to rip off Lui. Since Wai shows genuine compassion as he helps her to freedom, she falls hard for him and he finds himself falling for her just as he gets close to his target...
And this is just the first 30 minutes of the film! It goes on for another hour, heading to Hong Kong for hair-raising melodrama, as Mona is reintroduced, and then a big blow-out battle akin to the Colonel Kilgore sequence in Apocalypse Now for its finale in Cambodia!
The plot is absurd and absurdly fun as the stakes and action set pieces get more explosive. However, the story is told with a straight face so the through-line of Wai’s divided feelings between Crystal and Mona adds extra dramatic heft to keep the tension up in the loosely executed espionage action. You may come for the combat but the real action is with the women and Lam casts perfectly.
Long sections of the film rest on the interplay between the Andy Lau and his female co-stars. A San Francisco-set gunfight involving Wai, Crystal, and some mobsters is spiced up by being Crystal naked save for the leather jacket Wai gives her and the playful sexual innuendo that results in their rolling in and out of danger together. Their energetic back-and-forth dialogue delivery and comfortable physicality sparkles with a youthful sweetness and humour, an innocence that one can see extending from their performances in A Moment of Romance where they played out the earnest romance between an motorcycle-riding teen Triad and a shy rich girl who fall in love.
The real smoke show is Rosamund Kwan’s femme fatale, Mona. Six year’s Wu’s senior, she essays Mona as someone with a mature aloofness. While Crystal is kept innocent with a meet-cute and sex offscreen, Mona has active sexual agency and pushes Wai to his limits. Lam focusses the camera/blocking on Kwan who uses her eyes brilliantly to communicate. When apart from Wai, Mona’s eyes glaze over as her mind drifts to her moment with Wai, a match cut showing glimpses of their time together set to music from a twanging guitar while blue and red lights pulse over them. When together, Mona’s stare drills into Wai and all he can do is squirm. Sexual tension rockets every time Wai encounters her. When Mona’s obsession becomes overwhelming, the film’s most startling act of violence comes from their pairing.
Pacing is mostly fast and fights entertaining with tight choreography and stunt work Lam’s overuse of canted angles work not just for the chaos of the action sequences but also the sense that Wai is constantly in a fix, his infiltration/assassination operation always threatening to go sideways. Lam delivers everything with muscular Hong Kong action direction and his signature downbeat worldview and grittiness are deployed to imbue the conflicts between characters with an added venom. The film is most fun because the female performances are distinctly different from each other and pull and push the action narrative into fun shapes.