City on Fire (4K UHD Review)
- Review Date: Oct 13, 2025
- Format: 4K Ultra HD
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Director
Ringo LamRelease Date(s)
1987 (August 26, 2025)Studio(s)
Cinema City/Nova Media (Shout! Studios – Hong Kong Cinema Classics #6)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: B
- Extras Grade: B
Review
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:
A group of criminals stage a robbery at a jewelry store that goes horribly, horribly wrong. The survivors hole up while trying to avoid the police, disagreeing with each other over what to do next. Unbeknownst to all but one of them, there’s a traitor in their midst: an undercover cop who was planted in the gang in order to collect evidence against them. Since he’s a newcomer, the leader suspects he’s the one responsible for tipping off the police, but one of the other gang members has befriended the newbie and is willing to back him up at the end of a gun. That leads to a Mexican standoff between the survivors, with the last men standing finally learning the truth about each other.
Most western audiences will recognize that as being the basic plot of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, but Tarantino being Tarantino, he actually borrowed/stole the idea from Ringo Lam’s incendiary 1987 Hong Kong crime classic City on Fire (aka Lung foo fung wan). Yet while Tarantino used a variety of elements from Lam’s film, that narrative description only covers the last few minutes of City on Fire. Tarantino took the concept from Lam’s finale and spun it into what’s essentially a feature-length bottle episode, but there’s so much more to City on Fire than that. In Lam’s film, it’s just the release of tension that’s been building up gradually with everything else that preceded it.
Lam’s own inspiration for City on Fire was the May 1985 robbery of the Time Watch Company, which was led by Chan Fu-kui. The police had been tipped off and they were staking out the location, but they let the robbery happen anyway, leading to a bloodbath after shots were fired. Lam likely also drew from the experiences of notorious Hong Kong criminal Yip Kai-foon, who led a series of jewelry store robberies throughout the Eighties until he was captured by the police on December 28, 1984, in a sting operation that involved a cop posing as a buyer of stolen goods. (He later escaped and was able to continue his crime spree into the next decade, this time using AK-47s.)
In Lam’s story, which was expanded into a screenplay by Tommy Sham, undercover officer Ko Chow (Chow Yun-Fat) is dragged into an investigation of a series of jewelry store robberies by Inspector Lau (Sun Yueh)—but only after another undercover cop has already been killed on the assignment. Lau wants Ko Chow to pose as a fence selling guns to the gang, and while Ko Chow wants nothing to do with the job, he ends up getting dragged in deeper when he befriends Fu (Danny Lee) and is invited to join the gang on their next robbery. Meanwhile, Lua’s rival inspector John Chan (Roy Cheung) is hot on Ko Chow’s heels, not realizing that he’s an undercover cop. That’s what results in the robbery going so dreadfully wrong, leading to an explosive conclusion. City on Fire also stars Carrie Ng, Kong Lau, and Elvis Tsui.
One of the issues with Tarantino’s endless trolling for ideas from what others have already done is that his films tend to end up overshadowing his sources, at least for western audiences, and that’s exactly what has happened to City on Fire. That’s not really a problem for fans of Hong Kong cinema (like Tarantino himself!), who are intimately familiar with Ringo Lam’s work as well as the careers of Chow Yun-Fat, Danny Lee, and other Hong Kong superstars. Yet for mainstream western audiences, at least, City on Fire is something that they may have heard about in passing during discussions of Reservoir Dogs but have never actually seen. That’s a shame, because City of Fire was something of a landmark in Hong Kong crime cinema.
It was certainly a landmark in Ringo Lam’s career—prior to that point, he was primarily known as a director of action-comedies and romances. Yet he threw himself into the project with obvious relish, shooting guerilla-style on open streets (without a permit) and capturing some very authentic reactions from unsuspecting onlookers. City on Fire proved influential, not just on American filmmakers like Tarantino, but on Hong Kong filmmakers as well. Cinematographer Andew Lau carried the experience of shooting City on Fire into his own work as a director, especially with his undercover cop drama Infernal Affairs in 2002 (which was itself the source of Martin Scorsese’s 2006 remake The Departed, proving that the great circle of influences never ends). If your only exposure to City on Fire is discussions about Reservoir Dogs, you owe it to yourself to track it down and experience what the late Ringo Lam brought to the world of cinema before his untimely death in 2018, leaving an unforgettable legacy behind him.
Andrew Lau shot City on Fire on 35mm film using spherical lenses, framed at 1.85:1 for its theatrical release. This version utilizes a 4K scan of the original camera negative, cleaned up and graded for High Dynamic Range in Dolby Vision and HDR10. While it’s not the necessarily the sharpest and most detailed 4K presentation on the market, it’s still a noticeable upgrade over Blu-ray, especially in terms of how it resolves the moderate grain structure of the film. The contrast range is strong, with highlights that are on the verge of looking blown out but never quite pushing too far, and deep black levels wherever appropriate. City on Fire isn’t a particularly vivid film, but the colors are still nicely saturated with more depth to them than has been seen on previous versions. If there’s one issue here, it’s that there seems to be some kind of gamma shift on bright backgrounds like the reflections in the morgue at 10:00, and on brightly lit windows like at 42:55, 58:04, and elsewhere. I’m not sure if it’s a grading issue, a compression issue, or something that simply wasn’t working and playing well with my system, but it’s a relatively minor thing that’s only noticeable if you go looking for it. (It’s not visible on the included Blu-ray.) In all other respects, this is a fine transfer.
Audio is offered in Cantonese and English 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio, with removable English subtitles. The dialogue has that typically boxy and compressed sound of post-synced Hong Kong films, but it’s otherwise clear and there aren’t any major issues. The overall dynamic range isn’t strong—Hong Kong films tend to have one dynamic, namely, loud—but there’s still some punch to sound effects like the gunfire, and the music is reproduced well. (Note that there’s some online controversy regarding the accuracy of the newly translated subtitles, but as someone with no knowledge of Cantonese, I didn’t have any issues understanding what was intended.)
The Shout! Studios 4K Ultra HD release of City on Fire is #6 in their Hong Kong Cinema Classics line. It’s a two-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film, as well as a slipcover that duplicates the theatrical poster artwork on the insert. The following extras are included, all of them in HD:
DISC ONE: UHD
- Commentary by Frank Djeng And F.J. DeSanto
DISC TWO: BD
- Commentary by Frank Djeng And F.J. DeSanto
- Burn It Down (18:21)
- Hong Kong Confidential (11:30)
- Some Like It Hot (33:29)
- Burning Rivalries (14:03)
- Theatrical Trailer (3:30)
- Image Gallery (3:20)
The new commentary pairs programmer and former Tai Seng Entertainment marketing manager Frank Djeng with writer/producer F.J. DeSanto, and needless to say, the two of them have a thing or two to share regarding City on Fire. DeSanto provides the analyses, while Djeng delves into the minutiae regarding the production and the state of Hong Kong cinema in 1987. That includes biographies of the various actors and crew members, details about the real-life robbery that inspired Lam’s story, and the way that he shot scenes wild on city streets without obtaining permission to do so. Djeng and DeSanto do discuss the Reservoir Dogs connection, but they acknowledge that City on Fire was far more influential on the Infernal Affairs films than it was on Tarantino. Djeng never disappoints, and he makes a good team with DeSanto, so do check out this track.
The rest of the extras consist of new interviews. Burn it Down is with Tommy Sham, who describes how he ended up becoming a screenwriter by chance, and even his involvement on City on Fire was due to a lucky encounter with Ringo Lam. He also discusses the making of the film, including his own cameo. Hong Kong Confidential is with Grady Hendrix, co-author of These Fists Break Bricks. He provides a blisteringly quick but still quite thorough overview of the production, from its inspirations to where it fits into the careers of Lam, Chow-Yun Fat, Danny Lee, and Carrie Ng. Some Like It Hot is with author and Hong Kong cinema expert Ric Meyers, who offers a broader overview of Hong Kong action cinema in general and Chow-Yun Fat’s career in particular. Finally, Burning Rivalries is with author and critic Kim Newman, who dives into the Reservoir Dogs connection with both feet. Newman defends Tarantino’s work against accusations of plagiarism, pointing out that there are as many differences between the two films as similarities.
While it’s great to have an all-new collection of extras for City on Fire, unfortunately, none of the previous extras have been included. The Region 2 DVD from Hong Kong Legends in the U.K. had a commentary track by Bey Logan, as well as interviews with Andrew Lau and Roy Cheung. Various Hong Kong DVDs and Blu-rays have also included an interview with Ringo Lam that hasn’t been seen elsewhere (to date, anyway, although Arrow looks like they’re going to rectify most of these omissions with their upcoming U.K. release). Still, this is a solid set of extras, and let’s face it: this is City on Fire in 4K in North America. That’s worthy of a celebration of its own.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).