Movie Review: Out Of Inferno/逃出生天

I remember being really impressed with the Pang Brothers debut, Bangkok Dangerous.

The original, not the Nicolas Cage one.

Fast forward to 2010 and The Child’s Eye.

Next time, kiss me a little first.

By themselves, the Pang Brothers aren’t doing much better; Fairy Tale Killer? Sleepwalker?

To be fair, I haven’t seen The Conspirators.

Because I have seen Detective 2.

“What about Blind Detective 2: Seeing Red ?”

So I’m leery of going into new movies by either brother, much less both.

But it was a public holiday, and it was The Dynasty, and it was only $30 because it was 2-D.

So I figured that even if I didn’t like Out Of Inferno/逃出生天, I wouldn’t feel too bad.

If the poster is to be believed, this is Hong Kong’s first 3-D disaster movie.

But only becauseThe Stolen Yearswasn’t in 3-D.

Sean Lau Ching Wan and Louis Koo Tin Lok play brothers who both make their livings dealing with fire.

Imagine what this movie would be like if they were pimps…

Lee Sinje plays Lau Ching Wan’s pregnant wife, who is tired of always coming in second on her husband’s list of priorities.

Wouldn’t you?

She goes to see her OB GYN whose office is on the14th (!) floor of a building where Louis Koo is in charge of fire safety and is opening his new fire safety business office on the 40th floor.

There’s an electrical problem in the building that requires sweaty people to fix it.

And you know what the working class is like…

The building catches fire. Just accept it. Don’t think about it.

Lau Ching Wan leads his team of firemen to the rescue.

And tries unsuccessfully to avoid his wife’s wrath.

In the ensuing chaos, Louis Koo randomly bumps into her and her OB GYN.

Whose abject lack of courage combined with his profession mean that I justhave to call him a p*ssy.

Being a fan of inappropriate juxtapositions…

Crystal Lee, the child actress who was so engaging in  Unbeatable, turns up here, though her part is very small.

I’d say she was wasted, but children in disaster movies tend to be little more than set dressing.

Just like shrewish wives. But let me not speak ill of her mother.

Out Of Inferno/逃出生天 isn’t re-writing anything in the genre.

It is absolutely an exercise in ticking off the requisite points.

And making all of the same mistakes.

Absolutely none of the physical events of the film have even a shred of plausibility or realistic basis.

Nobody can see under water.

Except fish.

If elevator shafts were watertight, the elevator couldn’t move.

Think about it.

I didn’t get upset about it, though, because disaster movies are always implausible, even in Hollywood.

And they’re  always melodramatic. What good is setting up a frightening situation if you don’t try to make people  really scared?

And you do that through overstatement of risk.

But at least, for me, the melodrama in  Out Of Inferno/逃出生天 doesn’t get piled on with the wild abandon of Korea’s  The Tower.

There was so much melodrama piled on top of itself in that movie that it would not only have smothered the fire, it would have crushed the f@#$ing building.

There is an abundance of implausibility here, with the likely reactions ranging from ‘Huh?’ to ‘F@#$ off,’ but for me, it helped that most of them were incidental coincidences.

How did that person get from there to here?

Ahhh, who cares?

It’s not like the fate of the movie hinges on one of these implausibilities (though it does have more than a few along for the ride).

Yes,  Out Of Inferno/逃出生天 is technically implausible, thoroughly clichéd, narratively transparent, and emotionally simplistic.

But so is every other disaster movie you’ve ever seen.

The question then becomes ‘How well can you distract me from the glaringly pedestrian and occasionally ridiculous nature of this story?’

And for me, the answer is ‘quite a bit.’

Out Of Inferno/逃出生天 entertained me, and that’s all I ask.

Lau Ching Wan again shows us how and why he’s one of the best actors Hong Kong has ever produced.

He carries the mantle of Captain Stereotype well enough that I still believed him as his character.

Louis Koo and many other cast members made their characters remarkably human, especially in physical terms.

By struggling with things that people would really struggle with, they drew me into the film.

The film is set in Guangzhou, a southern Chinese city where the predominant language is still Cantonese, so most of the actors can be heard in their native language.

While firemen are civil servants, I didn’t ever get the impression that the Pang Brothers were trying to run the Poison Dragon Drill on the China Market, especially with one of the minor plot turns, which boosts the melodrama in an all-too-frighteningly possible way.

The fire cannot see them coming and is vanquished by their socialist moisture!

As I said, I watched this in 2D. I don’t care for 3D, and I wanted to see if this film had the same gratuitous “THIS… IS… 3D…” that Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon had.

I can happily say that it doesn’t. A couple of brief shots were obviously intended to be impressive in 3D, but the rest of the film, including the effects-heavy sections, were perfectly fine without it.

In fact, the visual effects really impressed me. I’m actually sort of pyro-phobic, and a lot of the scenes in this movie really got to me.

“So who’s the p*ssy now, huh?”

It’s unfair to expect a movie like Out Of Inferno/逃出生天 to be able to visually match a Hollywood disaster movie because the economies of scale are vastly different.

That’s why I think this movie is even more impressive when you take into account the fact that they didn’t have piles of money to throw into it.

As evidenced by this spread.

If you watch Out Of Inferno/逃出生天, the only surprise you’ll get is that the film manages to faithfully reproduce the disaster movie template, and that it does soon a much smaller budget.

I enjoyed this movie, I’d watch it again, and I hope it does well.