Restorations are net boons. Each and every restored film rejuvenates the decaying state of global cinema by a smidgen. The gorgeous new restoration of the 1990 Hong Kong non-stop shooter Fatal Termination, showing for the first time in North America at the Boston Underground Film Festival, blesses cinephiles with a penchant for Hong Kong cinema. The film itself, however, barely achieves competency and even this mediocrity finds itself marred with one of the most egregious and abusive child stunts ever executed on camera. Most movies have warts. But not all warts are made equal.
Moon Lee and Ray Lui lead a formidable cast of some of the hottest actors to ever perform in an indeterminable action-packed picture with a fuzzy plot about an arms deal gone askew with Middle Eastern rebel groups played by Australian actors dressed in Middle Eastern attire and with what appears to be brown face. What actually happens is more or less exactly the kind of thing that always happens in these kinds of movies: crime of all sorts, good cops, bad cops, gunfights, car chases, money making and money losing, vengeance, etc. The biggest exception to the usual tropes, at least by North American standards, comes through in the pessimism that colors the violence; unlike in all of the feel-good happy endings of Hollywood, not all of the good guys escape with their lives. Violence has consequences not just for the antagonists but also for the protagonist, as a proper buttload of people meet their brutal end.
Kam and cinematographer Patrick Jim have a gift for people photography. The leads smoke cigarettes, confidently peer through allusive and alluring sunglasses, and someone’s always looking defiantly cool as they fire a gun. The abundance of stylish low shots of individuals, usually in overpowering isolation, function not as signs of power or dominance like they do in Hollywood but of dejection. The action from Uzi gunplay to roundhouse kicks holds attention when it’s people-centric too. As the spectacle drifts into car chases and explosions, Kam and Jim struggle to maintain the same standard of kinetic appeal and titillating allure.
By most descriptions I can find of the film, one might be led to think this is another one of the girls with guns films that Moon Lee used to establish her name. She plays someone also named Moon, the mother of the kidnapped child and the wife to John (Roy Lui). Her scenes, especially the ones with guns, compel, but she is, unfortunately, just not in it that much. Everything she touches waxes better for it, including her incredibly and perfectly restless hair. The film requires a few moments of rushed lament that if it weren’t for Moon’s ability to burst into intense emotion then the film as a whole would lose something more.
Fatal Termination will always be known, to its self-imposed detriment, for child endangerment. In one of the many car chase scenes, a kidnapped child (Cheuk Yan Chan) is held by a hand gripping nothing more than a fistful of her hair outside the open window of a zipping car. The film was made in the late 1980s, when Hong Kong stunts gained a reputation for excess and bonker-ness, although there was never a time nor place in which a single frame of a moving picture work of art justified real-life child abuse– and that’s what occurs here. Her face reddens as she reaches in desperation for the moving car door and wipes a tear off her face in what must be a moment of actual self-consolation. I felt gross watching the spectacle. Child abuse should never entertain.
Fatal Termination
1990
dir. Andrew Kam
89 min.
Part of the 2024 Boston Underground Film Festival – watch this space to follow the Hassle’s continuing coverage!
Joshua Polanski is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, In Review Online, and Off Screen amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking & exhibition, slow & digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Eastern and Northern European, East Asian, & Middle Eastern film.
