In Hong Kong film Prison on Fire (1987), directed by Ringo Lam, Chow Yun-fat and Tony Leung Ka-fai play buddies behind bars.
Tony Leung Ka-fai is a Hong Kong everyman who finds himself behind bars, while Chow Yun-fat, in a superb turn, plays a prisoner who knows how to milk the system.
Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Roy Cheung Yiu-yeung
Ringo Lam Ling-tung
opens with a shot of Victoria Harbour: a brief glimpse of water, open sky and towering buildings. By the next scene, this sense of freedom and possibility is gone, replaced by a bus heading to a prison.
It is summer and the day the protagonist of the film, Lo Ka-yiu (Tony Leung Ka-fai) - a mild-mannered designer for an advertising agency - becomes inmate 51910. Lo looks out of place in the intake area. He is wearing a light blue suit, sporting glasses and floppy hair, and with abject terror in his eyes. The other men waiting with him are dressed casually; they have tattoos and a been-there-done-this attitude.
A flashback reveals why Lo is in prison: a group of thugs attacked his father and when he tried to stop the culprits, he accidentally knocked one of the men onto the street and into the path of a vehicle. He was charged with manslaughter and handed a three-year sentence.
The nature of the incident casts Lo as an everyman, unfairly punished by the system, and forced to live in confinement away from his girlfriend, among triad members, violent criminals and psychopaths.
