Young and Dangerous is not only a series: it's a phenomenon. The original spawned about 11 spin-offs, released in a rush between March and September, 1996. Here is a (complete, I hope) list of the entire set, with links to the Hong Kong Cinema Database.

In retrospect, given the way this series has evolved, I think I have to revise my opinion of the first installment. The increasingly dark, political direction that the sequels have taken casts Y&D 1 in a new light. Andrew Lau and Manfred Wong, I'm now convinced, were aiming at something ambitious: to give a representation or even a critique of fin-de-siècle Hong Kong society on the verge of 1997.  Their choice of the self-contained society of triad youths ("gu huo zi" [Mandarin], or "goo wat jai [Cantonese]") to represent this society in microcosm is provocative: a harsher, more cynical mirror of Hong Kong society would be difficult to imagine. That 1996 Hong Kong youth culture would take so readily to the styles and attitudes depicted in these films is even more disquieting.  In Lau and Wong's vision of Hong Kong, the criminal jianghu, the self-contained world of the triads, with its own actors, customs, and rules of behaviour, has taken over the mainstream. Y&D implies that it is possible to see mainstream society as a coherent entity only if it is viewed in the jianghu's terms. Violence, greed, pure struggles for power, and cynical amorality seem to have leeched out of the underworld, and infected every other sphere of society, to the point where they define the whole. Thus we have a kind of reverse moral imperialism: the Colony has been colonized by the criminal values of the Chinese triad world, or rather by its valuelessness: Western imperialism's defeat comes not at the hands of a renascent Chinese national pride, but from the colonized people's dark underside. Some victory.  The shallowness of the purported hero, Ho Nam (played by Dior Cheng Yee-Kin, Hong Kong's new heartthrob), is one index of the severely restricted horizon of what is possible in this world. Ho Nam seems like an undercharacterized stock figure from triad films: he is nothing but the sum of his blind, robot-like adherence to group loyalty. That's it: there is no creativity, virtually no character there. The more glorious traditions of heroic, impassioned, larger-than life loyalty canonized in John Woo and Chow Yun-Fat's collaborations in the late 80's have collapsed into this empty shell. Ho Nam goes through the motions repeatedly (one might say obsessively) --his loyalty is challenged, he proves himself -- it happens in each of the parts of the series. But this begins to feel mechanical the third time around, as if it only built into the plot because the genre compels it. Perhaps in a de-moralized world, Y&D suggests, the only type of heroism available is a vacant, ritualistic shadow of the original.  A Y&D spin-off, Once Upon a Time in Triad Society 1, acknowledges this point, and stretches it one step farther. Its central figure is Ho Nam's opposite, the bad-guy "Ugly Kwan" (played by Francis Ng Chun-Yu). Celebrating the villain replaces venerating the hero. Kwan is easily the most charismatic figure in the young triad world: he is creative, mesmerizing, larger-than-life. And his genre-dictated role as bad-guy is complicated, put into question by the film's fragmented structure. The implications are disturbing to contemplate. The moral inversion that characterizes this triad youth film's world view has consequences that severely disrupt the film's narrative coherence -- to the point of calling into question our fundamental assumptions that identity can be fixed, that truth can be determined.  The best that the triad youth films have to offer is a vision of generational change. The films possess a concrete historical sense, an understanding that events are situated in history, and subject to change. We see a traumatic, progressive transition in gang leaders, from older to younger. But it would be difficult to characterize the result as an improvement. In fact, part 3 suggests exactly the opposite: the elders had rules (a culture, a web of relationships, mutual respect); the new just have style, the latest elaborate hair and costumes, aggressive poses, with nothing solid underneath.  Without belabouring the point, it is hard not to see how this mirrors Hong Kong's transition in 1997, an evolution from bad to possibly worse. Outdated colonialism is to be superseded by native authoritarianism. In formal terms, the result might be much more attractive, but it is not at all clear whether Hong Kongers, like their young triad idols, will be any better off.    back to the index...  Shelly Kraicer  email the website editor all content © 1996-2002 Shelly Kraicer