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Touted as Hong Kong’s first radiation-disaster blockbuster, Anthony Pun’s Cesium Fallout chronicles the political and frontline responses to a national catastrophe as it unfolds on the outskirts of the city. Emulating the blockbusters of Irwin Allen and Roland Emmerich, the rampant urban destruction is complemented by a star-studded ensemble of some of the local industry’s most prominent talent. Andy Lau takes top billing as the scientist drafted to advise Karen Mok’s bullheaded politician when a fire breaks out in a landfill site riddled with illegal radioactive waste. As the leadership bickers over the appropriate response and who is to be reprimanded, it falls to the blue collar heroes of the Hong Kong Fire Services Department to tackle the inferno head on.
Yu Bai and Louise Wong are among the heroes in helmets putting their lives on the line for the sake of seven million innocent souls, but the city’s ordinary civilian population is almost entirely absent from the unfolding drama. The fate of Hong Kong itself is in the balance — a notion that inevitably fuels some potentially potent political subtext. Other notable cast members include Bowie Lam as the city’s fire chief, Michael Wong as the slippery businessman who owns the disaster site, Fish Liew as a pregnant radio responder, DeeGor Ho as a young firefighter trapped within the blaze, and veteran martial artist David Chiang as the city’s absent chief executive.
Writer Mak Tin-shu, whose credits include last year’s milestone alien invasion extravaganza Warriors of Future, offsets the action with a generous showering of overwrought melodrama, as is to be expected from such a bombastic crowdpleaser. Yet, between the tearful histrionics and noble breast-beating, he succeeds in injecting a few notable moments of barbed satire.
The action unfolds in 2007, a decade on from the handover that saw Hong Kong’s sovereignty return to China following more than 150 years of British rule, yet notably before many of the city’s more recent turbulent troubles. While the city remains prosperous, there is growing concern over a lingering British change to Hong Kong’s customs protocols. Shortly before the handover, politician Simon Fan (Lau) helped introduce legislation that allowed the city to become a dumping ground for unregulated “electronic waste” from overseas. Fan’s wife, a firefighter, died in a container port blaze caused by just such incendiary waste, which prompts him to quit politics and leave the city. His brother-in-law, Kit (Yu), also in the fire service, holds Fan personally responsible, which causes inevitable friction when Fan is recalled into the fold to advise on the current escalating crisis.
Cesium Fallout marks Pun’s third time at the helm of a feature film, following 2017’s Extraordinary Mission and last year’s One More Chance, a knowingly nostalgic comedy throwback for veteran leading man Chow Yun Fat. For more than three decades, however, Pun has served as one of the local industry’s most respected cinematographers, lensing many of the late Benny Chan’s action pictures, from Gen-X Cops (1999) to The White Storm (2013), as well as last year’s A Guilty Conscience, currently the all-time highest earning Hong Kong film at the local box office.
Pun serves as his own director of photography here, which goes a long way to ensuring that the unfolding mayhem retains a visual coherence, even when the narrative threatens to become unshackled. Beyond the blazes and explosions, Pun also presents a number of images that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who lived in the city through the pandemic or the preceding protests. Couple these scenes with a wavering, self-serving female figurehead, in the form of Mok’s acting Chief Executive Cecilia Fong, who surrounds herself with cowardly department heads beholden to protocol and incapable of initiative, and Cesium Fallout teases at a satirical hunger beneath its brash exterior.
Too often, however, the production feels as though it is being pulled in opposing directions by conflicting commitments to appease multiple masters. For every depiction of inept leadership there is a reminder that the disaster itself was triggered by the presence of foreign pollutants. Only through the virtuous actions of noble members of the Disciplined Services is there any hope for peace and stability to be reinstated in the region. This approach aligns with a number of recent mainland films, including Flashover (2023) and The Rescue (2020), which showcase the formidable heroics of the fire service and the Coast Guard in a manner that was previously reserved for military pictures, and play more like recruitment films than genuine entertainment.
Over the course of 130-odd boisterous, breathless minutes, Cesium Fallout bombards its audience with a cacophony of mindless destruction and muddled messaging, yet somehow fails to illustrate just what it is that these individuals are so courageously fighting for. Hong Kong itself — so often a palpable and intoxicating environment on screen — is almost completely inert, as though the city has already been evacuated and there is nothing left to save.
Title: Cesium Fallout
International Sales: Edko Films
Director: Anthony Pun
Screenwriter: Mak Tin-Shu
Cast: Andy Lau, Yu Bai, Karen Mok, Louise Wong
Release Date: November 1, 2024 (Hong Kong and China); November 8 (U.S.)
Running time: 2 hr 16min