A New Kind of Hong Kong Action Film

Fight for Tomorrow (拼命三郎) is writer-director Chan Tai-lee’s third film, but he thinks of it more as his sophomore effort. After making his debut as a writer in 2004 with Simon Lui’s comedy Escape from Hong Kong Island, Chan fell in with Wilson Yip and quickly found himself on the path to a career as one of the industry’s great writers of commercial action films. His work on Yip’s Ip Man marked the beginning of a critically acclaimed five-film franchise featuring martial arts superstar Donnie Yen that only wound down in 2019. 

“As a writer and a director, I’m actually not a huge fan of action cinema, and I would go so far as to say that I’m more of a fan of art films,” says Chan with a little chuckle, sitting at the boardroom table in Mandarin Motion Pictures’ Tsim Sha Tsui office. He cites films like Vittoria De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and the French New Wave as more his cup of tea. It’s the morning after Fight for Tomorrow premiered at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival and Chan is feeling relaxed and loose. He’s unimpressed with his achievement; at least he looks unimpressed, playing down any praise. The Baptist University graduate only grudgingly relents at the notion his third film is his strongest, and that he’s become quite an accomplished filmmaker. “I don’t know if I’m a better filmmaker, but because of the previous two productions I’m more satisfied with this one,” he says. Reluctantly.

Between his first credit and now, Chan co-penned 2013’s dance-driven The Way We Dance, and apprenticed — for lack of a better word — with Szeto Kam-yuen on Cheang Pou-soi’s The Monkey King in 2014 among others. Cheang has pointed to that film as a major milestone in his own career, so it’s not surprising Chan feels the same way.

“I’ve been working for 20 years, but it took me 10 to really get a handle on the process, and much of that’s largely due to Szeto, who I consider a mentor,” he says of the writer behind Patrick Yau’s stealth classic The Longest Nite, Johnnie To’s Exiled, and many of Cheang’s best films, including Dog Bite Dog and Accident. The veteran writer was well versed in navigating the choppy waters between commercial success and artistic fulfillment, and Chan credits him with helping him find his own way. “For my directorial debut I wanted to do a more personal, more artistic project, and I really started writing for myself after working with Szeto.”

In many ways that mentor-mentee relationship set Chan on his thematic path as well. He admits he’s fixated on the idea of the future, how limited our time is, how we choose to pass on the torches of knowledge, skill or culture, and on generational shifts. “The most basic form of that is being a parent,” he says. “The name of the first movie said it; it’s in the title. I wanted to focus on the idea of tomorrow. And because that film was about a relationship between mother and son, I wanted to change tack and focus on a father and son, and also move geographically. Another Day takes place in the New Territories and so I moved this to Kowloon. I actually think of it as [a] “tomorrow trilogy” that will eventually get to Hong Kong.”

Chan finally got around to making his directorial debut in 2018 with Tomorrow is Another Day, a domestic drama about a woman struggling to care for her mentally challenged son and a philandering husband. Growing up in a public housing estate, a space that influenced him as much as Szeto or school, he recalls seeing a public housing si1 naai5 (師奶) — essentially a working class housewife — running for a bus one day, holding the hand of a little boy who clearly had special needs. Innately understanding the simultaneously gossipy and supportive nature of estate si1 naai5, the image planted the seed for that first film. He followed it with the Chinese-funded Fierce Cop in 2022, a rather rote thriller about a cop travelling to Southeast Asia to rescue his son, kidnapped by human traffickers.

“My second film went back to the commercial side, and I had investors to answer to much more. It was a professional milestone. I learnt a lot making it. Because I started writing Fight after Another Day I feel more like that’s my second film rather than my third. But Fight for Tomorrow has a better balance on the commercial and the personal sides of the story because of that film.”

In Fight for Tomorrow, ex-con Sam-long (Patrick Tam Yiu-man) scrapes together a living as a shady valet parking attendant and lives in a tiny Mongkok flat. After getting into a scrap with some rival gangsters one evening he winds up at the police precinct where he runs into his estranged son, Shek-tau (Locker Lam Ka-hei in his first leading role). Shek-tau is a budding Muay Thai boxer who’s at the station because of an altercation with a potential opponent, David (Ying Chi-yuet). As can only happen in the movies, David is the bully son of Sam-long’s former gangster “brother” Lee Man-sei (Mark Cheng Ho-nam), the man that hung him out to dry on a robbery and sent him to jail for eight years. Fight slots in with a recent wave of local films that use sport as a metaphor for lives in flux: One Second Champion and One More Chance. Given the Muay Thai milieu and the parallels between the fathers and sons, the action focuses on a gritty kind of physicality that visualises the characters’ struggles.

Perhaps it’s ironic, then, that Chan doesn’t see Fight for Tomorrow as part of the Hong Kong action renaissance kick-started by the successes of Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In and Stuntman. While acknowledging the majority of his work as a screenwriter has come in the action genre, “I have no idea how or why that came to be. It’s destiny,” he adds with a laugh. That said, Chan also acknowledges the realities of the industry in 2024, and points to his skills as a strong collaborator— (necessary to any film — and as an artist willing to find compromises with a production’s various stakeholders. Fight for Tomorrow didn’t begin its life as pure action film, but it did incorporate action elements that caught the attention of investors. He also admits to lifting heavily from his experience on, again, Fierce Cop. “In that film the drama was there to serve the action, but this time it’s the reverse. The action is there to serve the drama.”

As Chan sees it, action has always been an integral part of Hong Kong cinema and represents it in other parts of the world; that doesn’t take into account the influence of China and the wuxia elements of action cinema. Audiences consider action to be part of Hong Kong cinema’s DNA, particularly in light of the fact that traditional martial arts houses and schools were a primary source for entertainment workers such as actors, directors and choreographers, right up to the 1980s. Action giants such as Sammo Hung, Corey Yuen Kwai and Yuen Wah all trained in martial arts first. 

“But times have changed. There are fewer and fewer martial arts houses that turn out filmmakers, and more and more filmmakers are coming from academic backgrounds, and when you come from that background, you’re more likely to write from a personal point of view,” argues Chan. “Younger filmmakers don’t come from the industrial complex of the martial arts houses and they’re not coming from those apprenticeship programmes, that route to filmmaking. That can partially explain why there’s less action cinema and more arthouse. Yes, there was a time a few years ago when action movies were not as prevalent in the industry, however, that DNA will always be there. So when people are presented with a new action movie after this kind of drought of course they’ll be excited. I wouldn’t say Tomorrow is another step in the return of action cinema, but if you put good action sequences in a movie, audiences will respond. I’m not sure it’s action as we knew it. It might be something new.”

Fight for Tomorrow is very much a drama about fathers and sons, expectations and the youthful urge to forge one’s own path. It’s typically Hong Kong in the sense that Sam-long is a low level gangster, but Tam and Lam inject the characters with a recognisable humanity and sense of guarded optimism for their futures, summed up perfectly in the film’s closing shot. Sam-long and Shek-tau wind up in hospital side-by-side but manage to find humour in their predicament. Chan took the spirit of Bicycle Thieves’ closing shots as inspiration. “The father and son are holding hands after losing the bike. That’s how they build their tomorrow after their catastrophe. And it’s based on intergenerational love.”

Chan has a similar guarded optimism for Hong Kong’s cinema. “If you really examine the industry and look at the 10 years ahead of us, I’d say I was a pessimist, but I prefer to express a more positive energy and something more optimistic,” he finishes. “Because we still have to face tomorrow. How are you going to do that?