Long Arm of the Law (1984)

Original title

省港旗兵

Directed by

Johnny Mak

Genre

crime film

Country

Hong Kong

Runtime

1h 40m

Rated

18

Rating

6.9 of 10 from 45 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

Five men from mainland China sneak into Hong Kong to rob a jewelry store. They get tangled up with a local triad and have to hide from police while trying to pull off the heist.

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What happens

Long Arm of the Law (省港旗兵, lit. "Red Guards in Guangzhou and Hong Kong") is a 1984 Hong Kong crime film directed by Johnny Mak Tong-hung. Five men try to enter Hong Kong surreptitiously, meeting their leader there, to rob a jewellery store. One is shot and killed by Chinese border guards. Police investigating another robbery attempt at the same store spot their car acting suspiciously while they are casing it and give chase, with the robbers only escaping by opening fire and stealing a taxi. Before the robbery has taken place, they are employed by a local triad to kill someone. The target turns out to be a policeman and they have to carry out the robbery while hiding from the police searching for them. There were three sequels: Long Arm of the Law II (1987), Long Arm of the Law III (1989) and Long Arm of the Law IV: Underground Express (1990). Declassified files revealed that the fourth film in the series, which has a premise based on Operation Yellowbird in the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre, was labelled by Chinese officials as "subversive". The Hong Kong government had considered banning the movie but was concerned that a ban could "give the film an importance it did not deserve", both in Hong Kong and abroad. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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