Fatal Termination (1990)

Fatal Termination (1990) starts off as a pretty standard Hong Kong crime action flick, but eventually it gets crazy as hell! Simon Yam (Naked Killer) is the charmingly scruffy (but frustratingly incompetent) detective Jimmy Lee, investigating arms smuggling. Wai Loong is played by Robin Shou (Liu Kang in the 1995 version of Mortal Kombat) who I didn't even recognize here at first, he is so young and fierce. Loong is a corrupt Customs cop in over his head with bigger fish who grows increasingly brazen and belligerent, but is badass enough to back it up.

Loong tries to deflect Li's investigation by framing one of his only honest officers (which dummy Li buys hook, line and sinker). That poor bastard gets framed, fired on his birthday, and eventually murdered in front of his sister Moon (Moon Lee, Angel Terminators 2 and many more) and her husband, making them the next targets. 

Up to this point Fatal Termination had been a serviceable Hong Kong crime action movie. You get some of the good stuff with a messy shootout that racks up the casualties and a warehouse fight full of painful looking falls. Otherwise, the storytelling is a bit pokey and bounces around without a lead character. The action is intense but sparse, until things pick up around the halfway point. Then an hour in, the moment this movie is infamous for happens. The bad guys roll up on Moon Lee. The craziest goon reaches out the car window and snatches Moon's little girl, and the bad guys (and the movie!) put the pedal to the metal. Moon jumps on the hood of the car, leading to a car chase with her smashing through the windshield, fighting and choking dudes inside WHILE HER LITTLE GIRL IS STILL HANGING OUT THE WINDOW! 

They do a great job with the combination of camera angles, editing, and film undercranking. Mentally you know it is sped up and pieced together (and the little girl was on a metal rig they had tested with a full person's weight first), but everything still looks fast and dangerous and on a visceral level the whole thing is automatically crazy and tense. From that point on, the movie is an almost non-stop spectacle of death and destruction with fists, feet, snipers, sub-machine guns and bazookas in play. There are multiple car chases where vehicles are progressively shot and smashed to pieces. Helicopters fly dangerously close to the ground, cars, and explosions from a seemingly endless supply of grenades. It's mean, violent, and thrilling. The sheer lunacy of the last half hour left me breathless and raised my overall opinion significantly after the messy first hour.

I thought this was going to fit neatly into my "Girls with Guns" reviews, but despite Moon Lee kicking major ass in the last act I think is only GwG-adjacent. Some GwG movies sideline their lead Girls, but they usually at least try to pretend or bait-and-switch that they are the lead character. This is a true ensemble. For that first hour Robin Shou's bad guy is the most compelling and dynamic character, and good guy/innocent character duties are split between two to four characters at any given time. So, it will end up a "Honorable Mention" on my GwG ranking, but it gets a "Required Viewing" for fans of crazy-ass HK action. Also, my wife officially has a crush on scruffy Simon Yam and his 5 o'clock shadow in this movie.

I almost didn't watch the movie when I realized my version had extremely questionable subtitles, but after a scene or two it became clear this was not the kind of movie where I would be missing out on too much characterization and plot details. They also provided some unintentional humor, such as the "Middle Eastern terrorist" known as... Dan (actually kind of fitting since they are all white guys in make-up). That had my wife and I giggling and riffing for a while. I was pretty proud of “I read the two most common names in the world are Dan and Mohammed.”

would you eat green eggs and ham with terrorist dan and simon yam?

EXTRA SUPER-DUPER UPSETTING SPOILER ALERT!!!!

Only a Hong Kong movie of this era would conceive and execute a scene of such distressing child endangerment as that chase scene. And only a Hong Kong movie would have the child character go through that ordeal, gets rescued by their mom, and then when the audience catches their breath shoot the kid dead in front of her! Wild stuff.