Wong Jing’s High Risk is one of the most underrated parodies of all time. So many people who love Jackie Chan and hate Wong Jing have completely missed the point of this 1995 classic! The Taiwanese poster with Jacky Cheung’s head being pasted onto that of a muscular soldier works on three levels - it lampoons Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo, the topless male obsession in U.S. martial arts movies and the poor attempt at convincing people that Bruce Lee acted in a dressing room for Game of Death (1978). Speaking of Bruce Lee, when Jacky Cheung is seemingly making all those war cries while attempting to squash a cockroach, the repetitive sound that is coming out of his mouth is the Cantonese word for cockroach i.e. “gaat zaat.”
Director Andrew Lau made a cameo appearance as the cameraman wearing the baseball cap in the scene where Jacky Cheung’s character Frankie Lone is shooting a fight scene that's reminiscent of the iconic scene in Bruce Lee's Fist of Fury where Chen Zhen uses the nunchaku to take on a group of Karate students. “Frankie” is a reference to the subtitled name of Jacky Cheung's character, Frank, in John Woo's most epic film – Bullet in the Head (1990). The irony is that Frank was more sensitive but less cowardly.
High Risk is a great meta movie. Jet Li plays a character who has to work in the film industry following the murder of his family. In real life, Jet’s manager was murdered but Jet couldn’t get away from making movies. When one of the terrorists shoots a child in High Risk, we see a shot of a crow. This is a reference to the dove symbolism in John Woo's The Killer, which Woo took to the next level in his Hollywood features (most memorably in Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible 2). Unlike the blistering bliss of John's shoot-outs, the shoot-outs in High Risk are like bulls in China shops.
The name of Jet Li's character, Kit Li, is based on one of Jet's Cantonese names – Lee Nin Kit. Like how Stephen Chow Sing-Chi is referred to as Sing Jai, Jing referred to Jet as Kit Jai i.e. Jai is Cantonese for boy. It's like in the West when someone is called kid even if they are not that young. When Jet Li teamed up with Tsui Hark to make The Master in 1989, it was decided that his character's name should be Kit. Ironically, Stephen Chow's character in Jet Li's Dragon Fight (1989) was named Andy Yau as a reference to actor/singer Andy Lau.
Generally speaking, it's fairly common for Hong Kong films to have actors play characters who are named after themselves e.g. Jackie Chan being the primary culprit. Jacky Cheung had already acted with Jet Li in Once Upon a Time in China (1991). Originally, Jackie Chan was to play Wong Fei-Hung in Tsui Hark's movie. This means that it would have been the only time in Hong Kong cinema when Jackie Chan co-starred with Jacky Cheung, although Cheung made a cameo appearance in Chan's Miracles (1989).
Back to High Risk, an overlooked spoof is in the opening school scene. Because of the timing of when High Risk was made; co-producer Wong Jing secured some of the funds by claiming that the opening scene is similar to Speed. However, the school bus scene is a parody of the one in Invasion U.S.A. – a 1986 Chuck Norris movie. The elevator assault scene (containing literal firepower) in High Risk is a parody of the one in Raw Deal – a 1986 Arnold Schwarzeneggar movie.
Unlike the protagonist of Speed, Jet Li's character goes through a redemptive arc that is more similar to the protagonists of Under Siege, Blown Away, Passenger 57 and Cliffhanger. The stars of the latter two movies starred in Demolition Man i.e. an earlier action satire. However, High Risk is actually more akin to another satire – Last Action Hero. The only detail missing is a fanatic fan like in Sidekicks (the 1992 Chuck Norris movie which was directed by one of his brothers).
Back to High Risk, writer Wong Jing thought that it would be also funny to cast another Jacky in the movie, so (besides co-star Jacky Cheung Hok-Yau), Jacky Cheung Chun-Hung was cast as a member of Kit's bomb squad. While Jet Li plays a disgraced bomb squad leader who becomes a stuntman and bodyguard for the Jackie Chan caricature, Jet's real-life bodyguard plays the commander who's in charge of the operation to save the hostages. His name is William Duen Wai-Lun, whose name is reminiscent of the “executive director” – Lam Wai-Lun (who can be seen above and below).
There is a misconception regarding the name of the villain played by Kelvin Wong. He's not supposed to be a doctor in the literal medical sense, but rather in the PhD sense. If you look at the original Die Hard (which this movie parodies), the villain was a middle-class Englishman. Even in John Woo's Hard Target, the villain was more sophisticated than the hero. Honestly, you couldn't get any more working-class than the hero played by Jean-Claude Van Damme. Furthermore, there is a Cantonese slang term which is used to admonish someone who is a know-it-all. The noun is Doctor Ten Thousand. The name of Ben Lam's henchman, Rabbit, is a Cantonese sex joke since rabbit can mean a gay toy boy. This is an in-joke about Wong Jing's City Hunter (a farcical version of Under Siege starring Jackie Chan) since Ken Lo played a homosexual terrorist with fantastic leg control.
Lee Lik-Chi plays a nerdy journalist who is named after a popular actor from Bruce Lee's generation – Lai Siu-Tin. Charlie Cho plays a Willie Chan caricature named after himself, although he reins in his usual sleazy portrayals since Jackie Chan's manager was not the libidinous type. The most sincere example of the character naming process is Chingmy Yau's character. Lok Wai-Ching is the name of a retired actress who was more of a TV actress than a film one. By the time that High Risk was in production, she was running a jewellery business which supplied the jewels that we see as part of the heist. Lok is noteworthy because she went from being a beauty pageant contestant in the mid-eighties to co-founding the Yan Mei (i.e. Miss Asia) Charity Organization in 1991. Jet Li's wife, Nina, is the founder. Chingmy Yau was discovered by filmmaker Wong Jing when he saw her in an ‘80s beauty pageant.
High Risk is the Hong Kong equivalent to Living in Oblivion (also released in the same month but later). The director of the latter, Tom DiCillo, was lampooning a movie star who he had worked with during the making of Johnny Suede (1991). Like Wong Jing, he changed the name of the character. As such, Brad Pitt became Chad Palomino. On the subject of American indie cinema, High Risk even manages to pay homage to Reservoir Dogs in a more original way by having Valerie Chow's character dance with the machete as music plays in the background. The difference is that she dances after she's used the blade to remove a body part that isn't an ear. The scene in Quentin Tarantino's film was, itself, inspired by a H.K. martial arts movie – Ninja in the Dragon's Den. This was directed by Corey Yuen: the main stunt coordinator of High Risk. You have to question how much of the satire was influenced by him since he was simultaneously working with Jackie Chan on Thunderbolt (1995) where Jackie plays a race car driver with excitable Japanese female fans.
One of the reasons why High Risk was considered a box office disappointment was because Jet Li doesn't get to fight Billy Chow at the end. After Fist of Legend, it would have been too predictable to have Jet Li engage Billy in a showdown. Seriously, that fight scene was too good to top! On a similar note, Wong Jing had tried to surpass the leg-holding gimmick of Drunken Master II when he had cast Ken Lo to reprise his gift in My Father is a Hero - another movie starring Jet Li. As you might imagine, local audiences saw it as a feeble imitation despite it being a three-on-one fight scene.
Some people asked why Wong Jing had even bothered casting Billy Chow in High Risk. He had cast him as a way to surprise the martial arts movie fans. When people paid to see the movie, they were expecting Jet Li to have the final fight. Part of the attraction behind comedy is to pull the rug from beneath the audience. Besides being a basic plot twist, it was a way for the character of Frankie Lone to redeem himself after being exposed as a fraud by Bond. The latter’s desire to challenge Frankie reflects how so many people wanted to challenge Bruce Lee when he was alive.
Director Wong Jing is a sarcastic satirist because of what he said about High Risk upon its release: “All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to anyone's manager and father, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The events which are portrayed in this film can only be deemed true within the world of cinema. The funniest character is as much of a composite as any character in the history of cinema.”
Jing was even more satirical: “No animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture. The snakes which were thrown were eels that were already dead. The snakes that were moving on the floor hadn't been thrown. The iguana fell on a mattress. You should be more concerned about the stuntmen who nearly died. No motion picture is protected under copyright laws because plagiarism happens all the time. Piracy is infringed so much in a clandestine manner that criminal prosecution is an urban myth.”