Cold War 1994

I've been complaining a lot about the multiplexes only showing things at 4pm, which is probably nice for seniors and students but is not great for those of us who can't ditch work terribly easily and maybe can't easily fit a mid-to-late afternoon movie in on the weekend. Sunday wasn't quite my only opportunity to see Cold War 1994, as AMC seemed to sell enough tickets to put late shows on Saturday & Sunday, but 10pm wasn't that much better for me than 4pm. They haven't added any later shows for the workweek or put it on the schedule for next weekend yet, although I wouldn't be surprised to see it get another week - it was much more crowded than some of the other non-mainstream films I've seen there of late and it can't bee that hard to sell a movie with Daniel Wu, Chow Yun-Fat, Aaron Kwok, Yuen Biao, Terrance Lau, etc., to folks who like Hong Kong action.

I also wonder, a bit, how the protracted development time for Cold War 3 led to the filmmakers opting to go the prequel route. There were four years between the first two movies that were supposed to take place right after each other, and four years after #2 would have bumped them not only against the pandemic but the 2019 protests. As much as you'll notice a lot of Hong Kong crime movies being set pre-1997-handover so that they can have a police corruption angle, I suspect that post-2019, there's probably also a lot of pressure to avoid showing contentious politics in the Special Administrative Region. These movies haven't been about ideology so much as maneuvering, but that may be just as bad, with China not wanting to present the SAR as being at the whim of petty grievances and personal ambition, and those were the engine that the first two movies ran on.

Hopefully it gets extended in Boston and plays elsewhere (EDIT - it has, but all afternoon shows other than Sunday the 17th at 6pm), because it was very easy to miss if you weren't actively looking for this sort of small release!


Han zhan 1994 (Cold War 1994)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 11 May 2026 in AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (Prime link for Cold War II), or Cold War II Blu-ray at Amazon

Cold War 1994 manages to pull off an impressive trick, in that it's the first time I can recall watching a movie and thinking "I wish Chow Yun-Fat were in this a bit less". Not because of anything Chow does - perish the thought! - but because the story being told in flashback is good enough that there's no need to cut away from it until the end, and doing so eats a little momentum. Not much, but just enough to notice or make one wonder if maybe this was envisioned as a streaming series that wound up good enough to cut into a feature.

Those bookends take place in 2017, six months after the events of Cold War & Cold War II, when Hong Kong's Chief Executive-elect Adrian Yip Shun-Ting (Louis Koo Tin-Lok) has asked lawyer Oswald Kan (Chow Yun-Fat) to vet M.B. Lee (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), the former chief of operations for the HKPD for a Cabinet position, despite his having resigned in the aftermath of Operation Cold War. Kan is incredibly thorough, and when current Police Commissioner Sean Lau (Aaron Kwok Fu-sing) arrives to inform him that Lee has vanished after an apparent break-in, Kan reveals that he has found a file from British Intelligence detailing a case from over thirty years ago.

In 1994, Lee (Terrance Lau Chun-Him) was the head of Team A of the Organized Crime and Triads Bureau, and after one of his men loses some seized cocaine, he begins an unofficial operation to recover it, leading to "Tiger" Fong (Pang King-Chee); the operation turns deadly when it turns out that Fong is also involved in a kidnapping and Lee has stumbled upon where Fong's men are holding their hostage. That hostage is K.F. Wong (Carlos Chan Ka-lok), Chairman of the Global trade group and husband to Rosa Poon (Fish Liew), tenth sister of family patriarch Sir William Keswyk Poon (Tae Kwan-Ho), who has had his son Simon (Wu Kang-Ren) summon Police Commissioner Dickson Hui (Michael Chow Man-Kin) to make it clear that he and Hong Kong's other wealthy families have paid a cumulative two billion Hong Kong dollars in ransom over the past decade and need the kidnappers put down hard. This falls to his chief of operations Peter Choi (Daniel Wu Yin-Cho), who is none too eager to retire in tandem with Hui as part of the coming handover and sees an opportunity to emerge in a position of greater influence. He intends to use Lee as a pawn, but Lee, when suspended and cut off from his OCTB team, forms an uneasy alliance with Jodie Yuen (Louise Wong Dan-Ni), the new boss of the Lo Yuen crime family which Tiger Fong usually serves.

Having just re-watched Cold War II in preparation (at the present moment, it is much easier to stream in the USA even for those who don't have an import Blu-ray than the first film), and it was a bit of whiplash to see Terence Lau's M.B. Lee so soon after Tony Leung's older version: Both are impulsive, with young Lee a driven rule-breaking detective while older Lee is more defensive and concerned about his job/legacy, and while one sort of expects maverick cops to evolve that way if the rise in the ranks rather than dying or being booted from the force, it's harder to see Leung's Lee in Lau's it is to see Chang Kuo-Chu's Peter Choi in Wu's (though, to be fair, Choi was a much less consequential character in the original films than I remember, actually only appearing in the sequel). More amusingly, it looks like they have tweaked the timeline a bit so that the 2012 original takes place in 2016 rather than the 2016 sequel taking place in 2012, probably to explain how Lee had an adult son on the force without any indication he was a family man in 1994.

Those coming into the movie cold because it's a big Hong Kong blockbuster with a stacked cast don't have to worry about that, though, and will likely have a great time for the same reasons that the other movies were hits: It's a dense thriller where director "Longman" Leung Lok-Man and his co-writers do a nice job of suggesting a ticking clock while still having a chance to explore seemingly every conceivable angle. There's cops of various levels of crookedness, of course, but also time to ponder on how succession plays out in these large family businesses, or how rocky a newly-invested mob boss may be, or how the British aim to maintain influence in the Crown Colony after the handover. It's a busy, busy movie, but the filmmakers juggle especially well to keep from either sprawling or bringing something up because it would logically be important but quickly finding a way to marginalize it. Its period setting is probably also clarifying in some ways, as the writers have had thirty years to ruminate upon and re-examine its issues rather than trying to be topical in a way that may age quickly - in the way that Hong Kong films are not allowed show (successful) police corruption after 1997, they likely can't show the sort of political infighting that fueled the first two films after 2019 for similar reasons.

The three showpiece action sequences are also pretty great: There's a fine shootout near the start, yes, but the motorcycle chase in the middle is fantastic. Not only is it fast but clearly legible despite being at night, it frequently turns surprisingly nasty and cements the (probably not romantic) chemistry between Terrance Lau and Louise Wong; it's not hard to imagine this script streamlined into something just built around them. Even the many-things-go-down-at-once section is strong, bouncing between different sorts of tensions rather than presenting concurrent gunfights.

Nice cast, as well; I've mentioned that I don't really connect Terrance Lau's M.B. Lee to Leung's, but he's a strong lead and pairs well with Daniel Wu's ambition. Louise Wong is often the movie's secret weapon - the film never explicitly states that Yuen is disrespected as Boss because she's a woman but her every bit of body language suggests that she knows she's an unconventional choice and there's a target on her back for it, and she absolutely can't afford any Romeo & Juliet nonsense with Lee. Tse Kwan Ho makes William Poon intriguingly multifaceted despite being situated squarely where one expects the real rich monster of a villain to reside. The film is absolutely packed with impressive stars in smaller roles - Chow Yun-Fat, Aaron Kwok, Tony Leung Ka-Fai, and Louis Koo in 2017 and FIsh Liew, Cecilia Yip Tung, Karen Mok man-Wai, Michael Chow, Yuen Biao, among many in 1994 - some of whom one might expect to have more prominent roles in Cold War 1995 (or Cold War 3, should that ever happen) even if they aren't holdovers from the previous films, while others are there to lend gravitas or establish exactly who they are in a movie that doesn't have a lot of time to introduce everyone individually. This even extends to the Brits, with Aidan Gillen and Hugh Bonneville a cut above the folks usually playing these roles.

(It does not include Sammo Hung, despite his being listed on IMDB and receiving a "thanks" credit; perhaps scenes with him as the boss that the others members of Lo Yuen are mourning were cut, or maybe there are just plenty of photos with him and Yuen Biao together as younger men to be used as props)

As mentioned, the film ends with a tease for Cold War 1995 and leaves a lot to be wrapped up there. Hopefully it won't be quite so long a wait as between the other films, and not just because Tony Leung Ka-Fai and Aaron Kwok can't defy time forever; this is a very satisfying thriller that nevertheless leaves the audience wanting plenty more, whether they've seen the rest of the series or not.