A clever, stylish and refreshingly inappropriate Hong Kong thriller from 1988, On the Run throws a beta-male together with the alpha contract killer who killed his wife and then stands back to ask whether they could ever have a relationship – the killer is a female, before you ask, this is 1988 after all.
It’s the odd plot turns, the beautifully choreographed fights and the high-style 1980s Hong Kong looks that are the selling point here. Fighting to get himself ahead of all that is Yuen Biao as decent cop Heung Ming, a man pitied by his colleagues because his wife, a minxy homicide squad somebody, has left him and is now playing footsie with her boss, Superintendent Lui (Charlie Chin). Heung works in Special Branch but everyone know this is a nothing job now that Hong Kong’s handover from the British to the Chinese is starting to loom. Special Branch has been rendered all but redundant.
Things get going quickly after an opening scene at a restaurant where Heung and wife discuss their (non) future together, at the end of which she is shot dead by the aforementioned contract killer, Chui Pai (Pat Ha). What Heung didn’t know is that Superintendent Lui is in hock to a Hong Kong drug gang, and that he is implicated in the hit on his own new girlfriend.
How Heung and Chui eventually get together and decide to go after the gang doesn’t matter too much and can be filed under “only in the movies”. But get together they do, he overcoming the early demise of his wife thanks to his forced proximity to the pretty, long-legged and devilishly impassive Chui when the two of them are handcuffed together. As Hitchcock might have said, this is a surefire way of getting to know someone, if you don’t beat them to death first.
Style, stunts and sex are the offer here. A man killed with two bullets neatly to the exact centre of his head. Another man mown flat by a truck hitting a telephone box. A new (to me, anyway) method of torturing someone – killing a man and then bringing him back to life with cardiac massage, only to offer to kill him again if he doesn’t talk.
Director Alfred Cheung and DP Peter Ngor give it the full 1980s HK treatment of contrasting colours, selective defocus, wacky angles and tight edits. There are plenty of close-ups. And there are stunts of the sort you might see in a Jackie Chan movie – one sequence with a bamboo scaffold pole is both audacious and witty, a classic example of the Three Dragons era of HK movies (Yuen Biao is one of the Three, along with Chan and Sammo Hung). Here, the ingeniously balletic and brutal choreography is by Hung, who’s also a producer, though it all culminates in a finale Sam Peckinpah would recognise, as slo-mo bullets tear into weak human flesh.
In between, and not getting in the way, some background on Heung’s family – his mother and daughter. In fact it’s Heung’s family relations that start the thaw in relations between Chui and the cop – a man who’s nice to his kid is maybe worth something after all. And she starts to become a sort of surrogate mother for the child she herself orphaned.
Yes, that’s madly inappropriate too. But it’s these plot improbabilities that give this film its zing. At one point, as if to point out to the audience that they are being ruthlessly played, a bunch of bad guys all burst into the Austin Powers mwah-hah-hah laughter for no real reason at all.
Simmering in the background, 1997, only nine years in the future. It’s Hong Kong’s impending change of ownership that’s forced the homicide squad into the drug gang’s orbit, we’re told. How’s a bent cop meant to get by if his source of bribes has dried up thanks to a clean-up of the force in preparation for the handover? Blame the British for everything, if you like.
But above and beyond the dubious political stimulus, this is a film that moves on its own physical dynamic. It has pace. The title does not lie – this film really moves.
On the Run – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
