5 - Stepping to the Fore: Dante Lam’s Operation Trilogy

Summary

‘When we struggle for life to the last breath, that breath is courage itself.’

— Dante Lam, The Rescue

Introduction

Compared with the directors discussed in the previous chapters, Dante Lam may be less experienced, but for a thorough study of Hong Kong directors’ participation in main melody films, he cannot be left unexamined. Lauded as ‘the flagship works of main melody action films’, his Operation Mekong (2016) and Operation Red Sea (2018) reaped boThcommercial success and critical acclaim. Similar to Andrew Lau, Dante Lam began his film career as an apprentice from below. He once said that he was a big fan of Hong Kong films when he was young, and he watched at least two films every week. In 1985, when the twenty-year-old was looking for a summer job, he was not aware that he would find a life-changing one in the film industry. During his brief tenure as a trainee at an advertising company, some friends introduced him to Cinema City, one of the leading companies in Hong Kong's thriving film industry back then, and this changed his life as well as the history of Hong Kong cinema. That summer job gave him the chance to be involved in blockbusters such as Aces Go Places IV (1986), directed by Ringo Lam, but his role in the production unit was so minor that he did not even have to go to the studio. In the late 1980s, he had the opportunity to become the assistant of Gordon Chan, who later became his mentor as well as Bo Le. Lam accumulated precious experience in filmmaking during the heyday of Hong Kong cinema in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially in Gordon Chan's blockbusters of various genres, such as Stephen Chow's undercover cop comedy Fight Back to School (1991), Jackie Chan's car-racing crime thriller Thunderbolt (1995) and Andy Lau's sci-firomance Armageddon (1997). with the support of Gordon Chan, Lam made his directorial debut, Option Zero, in 1997, a typical police and gangster film which he later revitalised with a series of exceptional crime actioners in the new millennium.