Burn Baby, Burn
Anthony Pun needs to sex it up a bit if his hearts and minds disaster thriller is going to have a ‘Top Gun’ effect.
Cesium Fallout
Director: Anthony Pun • Writers: Mak Tin-shu, Shum Kwan-sin, Wong Wing-yiu, To Siu-yung
Starring: Andy Lau, Bai Yu, Karen Mok, Ivana Wong, Louise Wong, Michael Wong
China / Hong Kong • 2hrs 16mins
Opens Hong Kong Nov 1 • IIB
Grade: B-
It’s official: Cops-and-robbers are out. Firepersons-and-robbers are in! Even still, Cesium Fallout | 焚城 is a hot mess. Technically and action-wise it’s totally competent, I would dare say strong. As a disaster thriller it’s got great explosions and the kind of eerie-beautiful, apocalyptic cityscapes that have come to define the sub-genre. You know the ones: The dusty orange sky or the ashy blue-grey of an abandoned highway. But while everyone was getting the visuals right evidently the four writers – with credits as diverse as Warriors of Future, Limbo and Trivisa – couldn’t come up with anything fresher than the dead wife, the angry in-laws, the moustache-twirling real estate bro, or the token girl in a “man’s” job (don’t worry, time was taken out of vital CPR to let us know women in the fire services have the same training and meet the same physical requirements as men). But I guess they were too busy detailing the city’s evacuation plans in the event of a radiation crisis?
Unwinding over the span of approximately 24 hours, Cesium is, at its core, a two-plus hour ad for the civil service, the kind of gentle propaganda that lets us, the audience, know that everyone’s doing their best given draconian, British-era policy and procedures they still have to work with. Everyone’s heart is in the right place, and in fine Chinese cinema fashion we are assured the story’s bad actors paid dearly for their bad actions with a few handy on-screen epilogues. This isn’t really a Hong Kong film; it just takes place here (they didn’t even try to hide the dubbing). It’s about as subtle as a cudgel, and unfortunately, selfless and honourable as firefighting genuinely is, Cesium Fallout is unlikely to pull off Top Gun-style recruitment numbers. It doesn’t make it sexy enough despite the high potential for random droplets of sweat on smooth body parts and inappropriately timed sexual tension. Too bad.
Those cans you take to Green 6…
The action begins in 1996, with financial secretary Simon Fan (Andy Lau Tak-wah) addressing an economic forum and promising policy changes that will make Hong Kong even more pro-business than it is while somehow gutting the fire department. Before you can toss a match, that combination of decisions leads to a disastrous container terminal blaze that kills Simon’s firefighter wife, Lifeng’s (discount Tony Leung, Bai Yu) sister. Flash forward a decade, and Simon’s retired from politics, his name is mud at fire services, Lifeng won’t talk to him. So he’s seeking redemption by learning about dangerous materials and illegal smuggling. When a seemingly harmless fire starts in a New Territories garbage dump, it becomes an existential threat when it comes too close to discarded cesium – just as a typhoon with the ability to blow radioactive shit all over the place rolls in. Bonus? Cesium ignites in water and could drop lethal fallout across Kowloon, nay most of Hong Kong, unless fire services finds a way to stop the fire spreading.
These are the disaster movie tropes that director Anthony Pun Yiu-ming, doubling as his own DOP, manoeuvres around and to his credit he clearly understands the material. He moves the players around the board efficiently, and provides enough cues, some purely visual, to tell us what’s going on, who each archetype is and what narrative turn they will fulfil. Simon gets prosaic, functional framing, whereas acting CE Cecilia Fong (Karen Mok Man-wai, reminding me of someone I can’t quite put my finger on) gets her perfectly centred medium shots. The heroic fire crews – led by the mobile command post boss (Kenny Wong Tak-ban), on-site captain (Louise Wong Dan-ni), youngsters just starting their careers like Ah-seui (Ho Kai-wa) and Finger (Locker Lam Ka-hei), the one “retiring next week”, Chain (Tse Kwan-ho), the one with a pregnant girlfriend (Leung Chun-hang) etc, etc – get more hero shots than littered Michael Bay’s Armageddon. Michael Wong Man-tak (he’s so awesome) and Michael Chow Man-kin as the shady developer partners looking to cash in on the disaster are bathed in low, smoky, light and shadow for maximum skeeviness. No one does simpering bureaucrat better than Kent Cheng Jak-si, and Patra Au Ka-man (All Shall Be Well) as the Observatory Lady steals every damn scene she’s in.
Though it flirts with asking questions about duty and accountability, the often thorny interplay between the two concepts and the larger issue of how private economic power players lord it over public policy to the detriment of the public, Cesium Fallout doesn’t have the space to really dive into answers to those questions for obvious reasons. Fong is just doing her best, and she reminds Simon of the impossible choices people in her position are forced to make (erm…). Fortunately, there are people like Simon, the fire chief (Bowie Lam Bo-yi) and whistleblowing government lacky Kelly (Ivana Wong Yuen-chi) around to Do The Right Thing and keep the scant bad apples apologists insist are, indeed, scant in check. Most of the film’s generous running time is spent on the personal stakes and emotional mayhem the looming end of Hong Kong brings the main characters. If you think for a minute Simon won’t reconcile with the bitter Lifeng, or that Fong won’t suck it up and take one for the team, or that either Ah-seui or Finger isn’t going to have to sacrifice himself for his trapped friend, well then you haven’t seen enough disaster movies.
The messaging is clear and you can take it or leave it, but that doesn’t mean Pun, doing a 180 from the more shameless sentimentality of One More Chance, can’t rustle up some slickly put together set pieces and creative action sequences. The sprawling dump, a blight on the greenery around it, is accented with blocks of colour courtesy of crushed soda cans, the glow of cesium vials and a splash of radiation sickness-induced gore; the fire crew’s scramble over and around demoed cars feels a bit like a video game side quest, but a fun side quest. Pun never loses track of where we are, where the peril is, or control of the kinetic camera. If anything the truly weak links are in how elastic Pun makes time and how little impact the inevitable tragic deaths actually have. But the biggest sin: No urban annihilation. It’s a disaster movie. I don’t know about you but when I hear “fallout” I expect a lot more to be laid to waste than a little strip of the New Territories.