Running Out Of Time (1999)
Director: Johnnie To
Cast: Lau Ching-wan, Andy Lau, Yoyo Mung, Waise Lee, Hui Siu-hung, Ruby Wong, Lam Suet

From the innovative minds at Milkyway Image comes Running Out of Time, an anthem to urban loneliness, job dissatisfaction, and unconsummated romance. When both of Johnnie “Heroic Trio” To’s partners left Milkyway, To became consumed with a need to prove himself as a film maker capable of going it alone. In 1999 Milkyway was known not only for producing stylish, dark and challenging films, but also for producing an unbroken string of box office flops. Not just flops, but painful bombs, each movie’s tiny grosses somehow tinier than the movie before. Running Out of Time is the box office hit that got Johnnie To his self-respect back, and turned Milkyway around.

Cantopop king and international mega-star, Andy Lau, plays a terminally ill criminal who sets in motion a complicated chain of carefully-planned events involving a diamond worth $32 million dollars, a cold-blooded, bald-headed Waise Lee, and the Hong Kong police department. Up against him is hangdog cop, Lau Ching-wan, an ex-hostage negotiator who’s been demoted to supply sergeant. He spends his days ordering light bulbs, keeping new uniforms in stock, and occasionally doing some hostage negotiation when everyone else calls in sick. Both men are terminally ill — Andy with whatever makes him cough up blood like a fountain, and Lau Ching -wan with his dead-end job and empty life slowly eating him away from within — and contact between them becomes a revitalizing drug. Lau Ching-wan stops wasting his life, challenged for the first time in years, and Andy finds someone who may just be lonelier than himself. Into the middle of their happy conflict comes Yoyo Mung (Expect the Unexpected) who’s taken hostage by Andy (in a swooningly romantic scene) and — doing what any of us would do if taken hostage by Andy — immediately falls in love with him.

Framed up against the hard edges and sharp corners of Hong Kong, cinematographer Cheng Siu-keung bathes Johnnie To’s meticulously crafted set pieces with a diamond cold, arctic light, and Raymond Wong (impersonating Danny Elfman on steroids) unleashes a hot-blooded, rousing score full of wailing bagpipes, chanting choirs and heroic melodies. The movie is not only a lighter remake of Milkyway’s earlier The Longest Nite, but To’s worthy homage to Alfred Hitchcock. Swerving vertiginously from jokes to action to chase to tragedy to high drama it throws MacGuffin after MacGuffin at the audience’s heads all without missing a beat or ruining the fun. A brilliantly cinematic collision between the proverbial immovable object, and the unstoppable force — Hong Kong’s greatest character actor, Lau Ching-wan, and its greatest pop star, Andy Lau — it’s part tightly-executed cat n’mouse thriller, part boy’s own adventure story, part Pepsi commerical, and part ode to urban alienation. Running Out of Time is nothing less than a feel-good movie for the terminally ill.