Dis­cov­er the unique thrills of John­nie To’s Run­ning Out of Time series

It does not take long to find out why John­nie To’s fea­ture is called Run­ning Out Of Time. For it begins with a man, Che­ung Wah (Andy Lau), walk­ing deter­mined­ly up a stair­case to the top of a sky­scraper, climb­ing over the safe­ty bar­ri­er, and stand­ing look­ing down to the street far below. This is inter­cut with an ear­li­er scene where a doc­tor informs Che­ung Wah that he has at most four weeks remain­ing before his ter­mi­nal can­cer undoes him per­ma­nent­ly. Che­ung is a man lit­er­al­ly on the edge and run­ning out of time, with noth­ing to lose – but he also has a plan for theft and revenge, where tim­ing will be everything.

Inspec­tor Ho She­ung-sang (Lau Ching-wan), of Hong Kong’s Organ­ised Crime and Tri­ad Bureau, prefers to play for time. Arriv­ing at a tense hostage sit­u­a­tion in a bank some 20 min­utes after his incom­pe­tent supe­ri­or Inspec­tor Wong (Hui Shiu-hung) first com­mu­ni­cat­ed with the armed men inside the bank, Ho berates his boss: ​“You did it again! You must’ve told them that you’re Inspec­tor Wong, and that they have three min­utes to sur­ren­der, right?” Ho is cor­rect, but with the dead­line come and gone, and the cred­i­bil­i­ty of the police nego­ti­a­tions in tat­ters, Ho still enters the bank unarmed and man­ages to resolve the siege, exhibit­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic cool under pressure.

Ho may not know Che­ung, but Che­ung cer­tain­ly knows him, and has writ­ten a big part for Ho in his enig­mat­ic plan. After lur­ing Ho in with a new armed rob­bery in the build­ing with which the film began, Che­ung, though sur­round­ed by police, will eas­i­ly extract him­self, even as the hostage sit­u­a­tion proves to be lit­tle more than smoke and mir­rors. Hav­ing gained Ho’s atten­tion, Che­ung will chal­lenge him to a game of cops and rob­bers over the next 72 hours.

Cheung’s ulti­mate aims, and even the very rules of his game, are not at first clear, but as these two men, both sim­i­lar­ly calm and col­lect­ed, will cross paths sev­er­al times, they will some­times work against each oth­er, and some­times togeth­er, over a three-day caper of twisty dou­ble- and triple-bluffs involv­ing a ruth­less gang of dia­mond thieves led by Baldy (Waise Lee).

In keep­ing with its title, Run­ning Out of Time is full of count­downs: the mere weeks which Che­ung has left to live and the 72 hours which he sets for his game to play out; the 30 sec­onds which Ho has to run down many flights of stairs before the emer­gency exit below auto­mat­i­cal­ly locks; the tick­ing timers attached to Cheung’s var­i­ous ​‘explo­sive’ devices; the minute that Ho gives Che­ung to con­vince him not to call in the police wait­ing out­side; the five min­utes it will take Ho to get Che­ung to the police sta­tion (and as Che­ung has told him more than once, ​“If you can take me to the sta­tion, you win.”).

Indeed, as Che­ung trav­els a future-less tra­jec­to­ry towards requit­ing past crimes and find­ing sat­is­fac­tion, the film plays with time and anniver­saries in mys­te­ri­ous ways, and even has its cli­max on the noto­ri­ous­ly ill-fat­ed Fri­day the 13^th. Per­haps the best illus­tra­tion of To’s games with time’s work­ings here is a tense sequence in which Che­ung and Ho, both men dazed, injured and bare­ly even con­scious from the impact of a car crash, crawl across no more than two or three metres of tar­mac to be first to reach a (sta­tion­ary) suit­case. This plays out like a clas­sic movie chase, except over a tiny dis­tance and in extreme slow motion.

There is a real charm to Run­ning Out Of Time. It may at times come across as a moody Hong Kong polici­er that riffs on ​‘hero­ic blood­shed’ motifs (except that the blood comes more from Cheung’s can­cer­ous expec­to­ra­tions than from any bal­let­ic gun fu), but, in pit­ting an hon­ourable police­man against a gen­tle­man thief, it flirts with being a bud­dy com­e­dy and bro­mance as well. Con­ven­tions of hero­ic mas­culin­i­ty are decon­struct­ed here, as Ho’s sex­u­al­i­ty is sev­er­al times called into ques­tion. ​“You don’t have a wife and you don’t fool around,” says the Head of Inter­pol (Ruby Wong) to Ho, ​“Do you know that many of your col­leagues think you’re gay? Well are you?”.

Ho may be deeply dis­tract­ed by the doc­u­ments that he is read­ing at the time and may not, as becomes clear from his fol­low-up, have actu­al­ly heard her ques­tion, but his answer in the affir­ma­tive is rev­o­lu­tion­ary for a film like this – even if he will even­tu­al­ly, aggres­sive­ly reassert his het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty. Mean­while, in the film’s cli­mac­tic sequence, mas­ter-of-dis­guise Che­ung appears in full drag, and gets Ho to kiss him. And so To brings an unusu­al­ly queer spin to all the machis­mo and mor­tal­i­ty on display.

Two years lat­er, To joined co-direc­tor Law Wing-che­ung for Run­ning Out Of Time 2, which not only sees the return of Lau Ching-wan as Inspec­tor Ho and of Hui Shiu-hung as the now pro­mot­ed but even more inept Assis­tant Com­mis­sion­er Wong, and even of Ruby Wong in a new rôle as the Madam Com­mis­sion­er. Andy Lau’s Che­ung can­not of course return, for that would require him to rise from the dead, but he is here replaced by an unnamed thief and mas­ter illu­sion­ist (Ekin Cheng) who appears to want to replay Cheung’s game – or some­thing like it – with Ho.

Near the end of the film, when Ho tells Wong that he is hun­gry, Wong replies, ​“That’s what you said last time.” Indeed there is a self-con­scious­ness to the way Run­ning Out Of Time 2 revis­its scenes and sce­nar­ios from the pre­vi­ous film, includ­ing the antag­o­nist stand­ing on the edge of a building’s rooftop, or manip­u­lat­ing the police into doing much of his work for him. Yet there are sur­re­al inno­va­tions too, includ­ing an indebt­ed police nego­tia­tor (Lam Suet) dri­ven mad, and ulti­mate­ly set free, by an impos­si­ble sequence of coin toss­es, and a car chase through the urban streets of Hong Kong where the object of pur­suit is, yes, a soar­ing Amer­i­can bald eagle. Mean­while CEO Tere­sa (Kel­ly Lin) is being black­mailed by the thief as she over­sees a high-stakes cor­po­rate merg­er, and comes close – but not quite close enough – to a romance with Ho, whose asex­u­al­i­ty is again foregrounded.

“I don’t know why, but every time I dri­ve a taxi, I would always pick up dumb bad guys,” says Ho, observ­ing the sim­i­lar­i­ty of his cur­rent entan­gle­ment with the thief to his pre­vi­ous one with Che­ung. The thief’s response – ​“No one would believe that” – is a meta cin­e­mat­ic acknowl­edg­ment of this film’s rad­i­cal depar­ture from plau­si­bil­i­ty, even by the stan­dards of its own mini-fran­chise. Ques­tion­ing plot points here, or ask­ing how the thief man­ages to sur­vive dead­ly falls or even to van­ish into thin air, is like ask­ing a pres­tidig­i­ta­tor to reveal the secrets behind his tricks. Bet­ter, per­haps, just to sit back and enjoy the mag­ic show.

Run­ning Out Of Time and Run­ning Out Of Time 2 are released on Blu-ray for the first time in the UK, scanned and restored in 2K, on 1 August by Eure­ka Video as part of their ​‘Mas­ters of Cin­e­ma’ series.