Viewer Comments:Chinese Midnight Express
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Totally ten thumbs up for this show. It has become my favourite and most inspiring show I have ever watched. Torturous, meaningful, and very amazing. Tony Leung Chiu Wai's (Liang Chao Wei) expressions of sadness, happiness have really impressed me once again! Good storyline too.
The promotional packaging is extremely sensational, but Billy Tang is surprisingly restrained. Of course, the film's intention is to exploit the expose of prison abuse and the plot remains dramatically exaggerated while the cautionary theme is just there for show. The villains are the corrupt cop Ng Ngai-cheung and the mean-spirited warden Lam Kwok-bun, while the four aces in the prison are protective of Tony Leung. The glorification of the triad is along the same line as the Young and Dangerous films. The long-absent Ng Mang-tat is back with the same vitality, giving the film its biggest surprise.
-Li Cheuk-to
The film's attitude of abandoning context is not commendable. It's not a matter of not having the ability to do it but that of refusal. The ending of framing the corrupt cop to put him in jail and his revenge in the prison is really out of control. Perhaps the film had wanted to be an expose of prison abuse or of prison vocabulary, but there is nothing good to say about it except "well done." Of course, the importance of this film to the prison genre is this -- here, learn a lesson, brother, money in your pocket.
-Pierre Lam
A prison film that avoids emotional plots and exaggerated violence. In the dark world of the '60's, the "survival of the fittest" social condition inside prisons is exposed. Criminals and an intellectual team up to face corrupted guards, using legal and illegal means to shake loose the charge of glorifying the triad. Retaining the usual anti-authoritarian and anti-police tone of other Hong Kong films, Tong Leung's monologue is calm and unemotional, probably the remembrances of the three consultants, voicing the heart-felt words of the prisoners who have always been scorned by the public.
-ManAlone Ho
The Chinese title has a '60's feel ("Song of the Broken Guts") and is consistent with the film's emphasis on the triumph of truth. But from the production to the plots, everything has been calculated and the situation of "words" winning over violence probably had never happened, especially when the background has been moved back to the '60's, when Hong Kong was under a much darker cloud. The Union Jack in Prison on Fire is evocative, while the framing in this film has no such political imagination (perhaps there is: that we have been framed to become another type of colony).
-Bono Lee
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