The Millionaires Express

Off The Rails

The Millionaires Express -
Extended International Cut
aka Foo gwai lip che
Hong Kong 1986
Directed by Sammo Kam-Bo Hung
Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray Zone B

The Millionaires Express is directed by and also starring legendary Hong Kong comedy/action actor/director/producer Sammo Hung. He’s not the reason I’m watching this one though... it’s also the third film to star Cynthia Rothrock. Well, I say star but in truth she plays a minor role and really only has about three scenes in it. But this includes a nice fight scene with Hung himself at the end... more on that in a little while.

Okay, so the film is set in the early 20th Century and it’s a very convoluted plot. It’s not completely hard to follow but it has absolutely loads of characters and at least five different sets of interested parties (including large numbers such as the mountain bandits who Rothrock is a part of) intersecting on the path of a train... the titular Millionaires Express... in order to steal a map held by three Japanese samurai, which leads the way to the Terracotta Warriors ‘resting place’. And it’s quite convoluted and has lots of things going on. For instance, in the first 15 minutes of the film, Sammo Hung falls into an army trap in the snowy wastelands, dances in drag, escapes by using stolen explosives but then finds himself recaptured by a bounty hunter, who he escapes from with the two fighting and forming a giant rolling snowball... all this just to set up the quality of the kind of ‘honourable rogue’ Hung’s character is and also to highlight the bounty hunter before he returns for the final third of the film.

And from then on, the twists and turns of the narrative continue in a convoluted manner and, because it’s also a comedy, there’s lots of farce and physical humour throughout too. Not always so broad that it almost defeats the main narrative... such as it does in films like The Inspector Wears Skirts, to a certain extent (review coming soon)... but enough that you never get bored with the film at any rate.

Every character (and we’re well into double figures in main characters here folks... it seems to me), has their own story and stake in the narrative objective and the director manages to explore them all while still keeping a certain amount of action going. The setting, although its obviously supposed to be taking place in China, also borrows the tropes of the Western genre... in fact, the film very much seems to be taking some of its influences from Italian Westerns of the mid to late 1960s, it seems to me (which in turn looked back at Japanese chanbera, some of which looked back at the US westerns anyway, to an extent).

It’s a fun ride and Sammo Kam-Bo Hung does come across as a likeable chap, as he tries to redeem himself and make more profits for the town where he once lived. To this end, he manages to blow up the rails and stop the train just at the edge of his town so the place can profit from the many passengers for the duration of this unscheduled stop. And it’s here where the last 20 minutes or so of action take place, as all the main interested parties take place in a battle royale, with the camera cutting between various protagonists and antagonists for a very well choreographed and satisfying end game.

It’s in this final battle where Hung and Cynthia Rothrock have their final show down but, after the former has shown the latter his superior fighting skills, he lets her go and its revealed in the dialogue that she was once one of his followers... I think. It’s actually a bit reminiscent of that scene in Yojimbo where Toshiro Mifune lets a young thug live and escape rather than snuff out the life of someone who should never have got mixed up with the wrong people in the first place (even Tarantino had a moment clearly influenced by that scene in the House Of Blue Leaves section of Kill Bill Vol. 1). But Rothrock, who was suffering from a leg injury at the time of filming, certainly gives as good as she gets in the fighting stakes and she comes off pretty well here.

And there are so many other actors in this who turn up in a lot of these Hong Kong action films and are recognisable from a lot of them. I don’t know their names but, heck, there are a lot of ‘known’ actors in this and the whole film has the kind of epic feel of a Sergio Leone epic, for sure... when it’s not trying to be too slapstick, it has to be said. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed The Millionaires Express and I’ll certainly try to give this one another watch sometime in the future.