An incredible and incendiary tale from Ringo Lam, one of Hong Kong's most interesting directorial talents in the late 1980s. This is very much a slow burner mixing Triad life with school trials and for the first hour I was engrossed, although there wasn't anything particularly stand-out about what I was watching. It's more a work of social realism than anything else, with a good emphasis on the darkness of the human spirit and the depths to which ordinary people are driven in order to merely survive. There are fine performances from all of the cast, Roy Cheung in particular. In the last twenty minutes the film transforms into something else entirely with a bleak and graphically violent extended climax just as powerful as that of TAXI DRIVER; combined with a stunning Lowell Lo score it blew my mind, and is the best climax to a film I've seen in a very long time.
Review of School on Fire
