‘Mercenaries from Hong Kong’ or — The Liberating Effect of Moral Irresponsibility?
Have you ever watched ‘The Wild Geese’ (1978) but thought it wasn’t violent or stupid enough and that its climax needed to descend into a nihilistic, morally irresponsible nightmare? You have? Then the Shaw Brothers’ ‘Mercenaries from Hong Kong’ (1982) is the film for you!
The plot revolves around… okay, it’s not even worth mentioning the plot because it’s essentially nothing more than a beat-for-beat rip off of ‘The Wild Geese’ with influences from pretty much every other mercenary movie of that period you can think of slammed together. So we have a group of ex-military buddies recruited by a wealthy business woman to slip into Cambodia, kidnap the assassin responsible for the death of her father and bring him back to Hong Kong. Every member of this squad has his own unique talents and skill set — marksman, explosive expert, etc — and each has a reason for needing the pay cheque (including one who has a daughter with kidney disease so at least we know she’s going to be okay… right?).
It’s a quick in-and-out job so as long as they stick to the plan then nothing can go wrong. Things go wrong.
As you can tell from all that you’d have better luck locating a murderous assassin in the Cambodian jungle than you would trying to find any shred of originality in this movie. It’s also packed with offensively dated humour, movie-destroying tonal lurches and an attitude to violence that’s not so much cavalier as positively gleeful. The thing is these none of these are actually the movie’s big problem. No, ‘Mercenaries from Hong Kong’s big problem is that it’s so ludicrously entertaining you won’t give a damn about any of the above and may even find yourself actively egging all the insanity along.
Director Jing Wong achieves this level of excitement by using a highly subtle and sophisticated cinematic technique, namely blasting everything along at a billion miles an hour until the audience starts suffering seizures because there’s barely any space to breathe. At one point the team of mercenaries head off to a nightclub for a little R & R before setting off on their deadly mission. Now for any normal movie (“normal” is not a word that can be applied to ‘Mercenaries from Hong Kong’ in any way whatsoever) this would be the scene where the film, the team and the audience all have a little downtime before the explosive finale. But no, Wong turns even their relaxation period into a blistering fight sequence that most other action films would happily call their climactic set-piece.
Not only that but even when the mission is completed and the film has reached the point where similar movies would start rolling their end credits we discover, to our shock, we’re only an hour into ‘Mercenaries From Hong Kong’, so not only has it crammed an entire film’s worth of mayhem and action into only sixty minutes but there’s still another half hour or madness to come which involves discovering who the real big bad is and then promptly and systematically destroying and annihilating everyone and everything on screen.
From here on it’s a headlong plunge into nihilistic extermination that feels oddly and perversely refreshing because I found myself sitting there thinking “Well, there’s no way any Hollywood movie would ever do THAT!”
‘Mercenaries from Hong Kong’ is not the sort of movie you want to watch if you demand narrative rigour, character depth or ethical maturity from your cinema as measured against those criteria the film’s an offensively adolescent mess. If, on the other hand, you want wall to wall action with a frenetic pace that practically demolishes any and all comprehensibility then the film’s practically a bloody masterpiece.
