Film Review: Righting Wrongs 執法先 (1986) - Hong Kong
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 9/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ 1/2
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There is a moment early in Righting Wrongs when Yuen Biao, playing a prosecutor who still believes the law is a kind of church, watches the system fail in front of him. A witness is supposed to be protected. The witness is not protected. The family is not protected. The law, which he has treated as scripture, turns out to be a piece of paper that can be folded and put in a pocket. After that, the movie stops being a courtroom story and becomes something closer to a confession.
Corey Yuen directed it, and he and Biao also staged the fights. That matters. This is not a film in which action is the dessert after the plot. The action is the argument. Every kick is a sentence the courts refused to write.
Biao’s Jason Ha is not the usual invincible hero of mid-1980s Hong Kong. He is small, precise, almost courtly in the way he moves, and then he is suddenly terrifying because the courtesy has been used up. Cynthia Rothrock, as Inspector Cindy Si, is the best thing that could have happened to him. She is not there to be rescued or to look impressed. She is there to catch him, and she is good enough that the movie has to take her seriously. Their scenes together have the rare quality of two professionals who recognize each other’s competence and resent it.
The supporting cast does the unglamorous work that makes a thriller feel lived-in. Melvin Wong’s cop has the weary authority of a man who has seen too many files close themselves. Roy Chiao, as the magistrate, carries the weight of an institution that still thinks it is noble. Corey Yuen himself turns up as a thug-like cop and seems delighted to be punched with a good heart. Wu Ma as the elder cop and father steal scenery as well.
What the film understands, and what a lot of vigilante pictures pretend not to, is that once you step outside the law you do not become free. You become responsible for everything that follows. Righting Wrongs has several endings, depending on which cut you find. The Hong Kong version is the honest one. It does not flatter the audience with the idea that righteous violence comes with a refund.
The fights are among the best of their decade. Not because they are the most elaborate — though some of them are — but because they are staged as conversations that have run out of words. Rothrock’s construction-site sequence, the cramped apartment brawls, Biao’s sudden explosions of geometry: these are not highlights reels. They are the plot arriving at the only language left.
I have seen the film on old video and on the later boutique discs that finally treat it as something worth preserving. It holds. The 1986 Hong Kong of the movie — the corridors, the neon, the sense that the city is always one phone call away from collapsing into private justice — still feels specific rather than nostalgic.
Righting Wrongs is not a perfect film. A subplot or two is there mainly to keep the bodies moving. A joke lands with a thud. None of that matters much. What matters is the look on Biao’s face when he realizes that doing the right thing and doing the legal thing have parted company, and that he is going to have to live in the gap.
That is a subject worth 96 minutes. This one earns them. (Neo, 2026)