Casino Raiders (1989) Hong Kong hustlers Lau and Tam in underseen brotherhood drama (Review)

One of cinema’s greatest challenges is making gambling exciting to watch. It’s somewhat easier to throw the viewer into the mind of a gambler, and in fact the risky, irrational thinking of someone addicted to the high of the bet is narrative rocket fuel for many movies. Uncut Gems couldn’t care less about whether you know what parlays or rebounds are in basketball, since all it focuses on is the minute-by-minute decision-making of its dangerous protagonist. Take a film like Casino Raiders – the newly remastered Hong Kong crime drama from 1989 headlined by Alan Tam and Andy Lau, and you’ll find it fills a nice sweet spot between a study of the unfair rules of card games, and the cads who bend them. Equal parts classic character drama and high-stakes sports movie, Eureka Entertainment’s fresh release of this forgotten tale of brotherhood and the cruel march of time highlights a worthy, often very entertaining chapter in late ’80s Hong Kong cinema.

The arbitrary world of Casino Raiders is introduced through a tooth-and-nail battle between two geckos in a rainstorm, with one critter’s head inside the other’s mouth as the fight escalates. A human boot heel crushes them mid-scrap, and the expectations are set for a story where all bets are off for who lives and who dies. The owner of the boot is Andy Lau’s Crab Chan – Asia’s No.1 Gambler (and swindler), finishing up his prison sentence and eager to get back to the game. His path soon crosses with old friend Sam Law (Alan Tam), an upwardly mobile equal to Crab and partner-in-crime for life. Their joint expertise in the ins and outs of casinos across the globe sends them to the US, where new cutting-edge CCTV technology enables them to detect cheating on a near-microscopic level. They ultimately prove to be too good at their job, however, setting their destinies on a trajectory with a high-flying conglomerate of Japanese gangsters determined to monopolise the gambling halls of the world.

There’s something of Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets to the eventual story filmmakers Jimmy Heung and Wong Jing chose to tell, with Crab and Sam somewhat mirroring the arcs of Johnny Boy and Charlie in Scorsese’s breakout hit. They’re closer than brothers despite not being tied by blood, and their differing temperaments land them in hot water when one pulls the other into their mess. Casino Raiders‘ strongest moments are in the unapologetically affectionate and emotional acknowledgements of camaraderie and loyalty between Crab and Sam, which sets enough groundwork for some pleasing shifts into ‘heroic bloodshed’ mode.

By the time Casino Raiders was released in 1989, Andy Lau’s charisma had already proven many times over through collaborations with Chow Yun-Fat, Wong Kar-Wai, Johnnie To and Cynthia Rothrock (to name but a few), and at 28 years-old he possessed more swagger than most people can ever hope to achieve in five lifetimes. He’s electric here, chain-smoking and coin-tossing his way through a script that sets him up as a bad-ass, and he fully delivers on that front. Alan Tam (11 years Lau’s senior, but not looking it), has the trickier role to pull off, needing to shift from smooth operator to humble little boy as the need for a legitimate profession becomes more and more pressing. He’s also great, and having these two anchors in the middle of this sturdy potboiler makes it work when things on the periphery threaten to sink it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly (but no less unfortunately), the women of the film suffer the most. It’s first and foremost a film about fellas for fellas, so the perspective on the long-suffering girlfriends and wives of the characters is almost completely off. Take the second act romance between Sam and Idy Chan’s Tong, that kicks off with a surprise birthday party/extended prank involving her nearly being sexually assaulted (on Sam’s orders). It’s quite mind-bending that this doesn’t send her packing, but it instead completely enamours her to him. Save one moment of agency in the film’s final minutes and a strong performance from Chan in a thankless role, Casino Raiders‘ gender politics are hardly its strongest suit.

Another element that hasn’t aged well is its frequent use of janky slow-motion for dramatic effect. There’s a kitschness to these moments that’s initially charming, yet wears thin when you’re constantly watching high emotions being milked at six frames-per-second. The action beats are as high-octane as the poker sequences, and therein lies the aforementioned challenge – how to make gambling a spectacle because as they stand, they’re all bang and no filler – but sometimes filler is needed to ratchet up tension.

When every character is able to play a strong hand every round there’s a dissonance between the real stakes of the game and how good these scoundrels are at it. Whether they’re cheating or just plain lucky, the result seems to be a foregone conclusion that they’re going to be neck and neck with their foes during every play. Cinema’s greatest poker film, Casino Royale, remains the gold standard for characters playing life or death with a deck of cards because it lets its hero and villain lose in a straightforward, unceremonious and unglamourous fashion. The poker scenes in Casino Raiders do hold a certain level of entertainment that makes each card shuffle just a little gripping, but never pulse-pounding.

As flawed crime thrillers go, one could do far worse than Casino Raiders. As a star vehicle for Lau and Tam, it stands alongside 88 Films’ recent release of The Last Blood (also titled Hard Boiled II, despite having no connection to John Woo’s none-more-iconic classic), as a fun opportunity to showboat their charisma. The surprisingly sensitive and open emotional texture gives this a great boost, making its expansive 129 minute runtime a worthwhile endeavour, and a nice rediscovery courtesy of Eureka Entertainment.

Simon’s Archive – Casino Raiders (1989)