The Roar of Vietnamese
Reviewed by YTSL
It can make for a somewhat strange and ironic
experience to watch this 1991 film some years after the Handover of Hong
Kong (back) to Mainland China. This is due in some part from the
grim movie's most sympathetic characters being ones who had fled to the
former British Crown Colony from a communist country. This is especially
so when we are shown how desperate they were to leave their homeland and
what they are willing to do to avoid being sent back there. Something
else to be considered is its being so that although the unfortunate individuals
in focus are Vietnamese in terms of nationality, they are Cantonese-speaking
ethnic Chinese (like Tsui Hark as well as the characters essayed by Tony
Leung Ka Fai and Dean Shek in the auteur's "A Better Tomorrow III").
THE ROAR OF VIETNAMESE -- an offering which would
have been better entitled "Roar of the Vietnamese" -- starts off with the
on-screen display of black and white documentary or news type still pictures
of representatives of what have come to be known to the world as "boat
people". These are then followed by a Hong Kong TV news reporter's
painting a not particularly complimentary portrait of these refugees.
All in all, for much of the first half of the film, the audience is provided
with less than complimentary views of particular Vietnamese personalities
(all of them with the kind of records that caused them to be pre-selected
-- by a corrupt cop played by Lai Hon Chi -- to be willing to commit crimes
in Hong Kong in return for being sprung out of the refugee center and given
hope of their getting to emigrate to the U.S.).
Just as it seems as though they have been established
as being downright disgusting, if not irredeemably inhuman(e), by way of
their being shown engaging in the kind of acts that are considered anti-social
(e.g., open masturbation) as well as outright criminal (e.g., the cold-blooded
murder of a child), the makers of THE ROAR OF VIETNAMESE radically change
tack. More specifically: The recruits to the "Viet Gang"
who carry out "missions" -- that range from setting fire to a recreation
center into which people have been locked to directly attacking and killing
other folks -- consequently are shown to be truly at the mercy of the afore-mentioned
Officer Mak, his lieutenant (Waise Lee plays the Hong Kong-born Vietnamese
turncoat named Tian San) and a woman we first see being questioned by the
police as to the whole affair (Sibelle Hu's Wai Yuen is yet another Vietnamese
refugee) as well as people who do care for the welfare of their fellows,
even if not their unfortunate victims.
To a surprising extent (in large part, I suspect,
due to the strength of the cast rather than the script), the main group
focused upon in THE ROAR OF VIETNAMESE do get individualized, and humanized.
Those who really stand out are: A mother (portrayed by Kara Hui Ying
Hung, an actress who really deserves to be in higher budget and quality
productions than this one) and the silent daughter she obviously loves
very much; a quiet ex-cop (played by Kwan Lai Kit); and someone wrongly
arrested by his now "team-member" and still chaffing at having spent three
years in jail as a result as well as his current circumstance (Lau Ching
Wan shines here and is the heart of this film). The others in the
gang are: A young woman and the man who took a bullet in the neck
that was meant for her and subsequently has become mute (played by Chan
Pui-San and Cheung Kwok-Leung); a dissident intellectual type who spends
his free time writing never mailed wishful letters to his mother; a fellow
who spends much of his time in between "missions" sleeping to dream; and
a virgin man-boy consigned to be the most caricaturish character of this
lot.
If only there hadn't been a compulsion to supplement
the movie's dramatic portions with a slew of action sequences that actually
don't look all that greatly realistic. My feeling too is that the
addition of triad intrigue dilutes the emotional political message and
components of THE ROAR OF VIETNAMESE. This is a great pity because
what could have been a really interesting serious film ended up feeling
cheapened as well as made mundane by those of its sections that could have
existed in just about any low budget Hong Kong movie (as opposed to one
with the unusual group of characters and starting point that this film
had).
My rating for the film: 5.5