Surprisingly incoherent and boring

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

LIFELINE is something a bit different from director Johnnie To, a man best known for his gangster and crime movies. This one's the Hong Kong answer to BACKDRAFT, charting the lives of a group of fire fighters as they tackle various events throughout their catchment area and often come into life-or-death situations. The film doesn't have any showy stars or the like, and instead it focuses on small-scale drama and human peril.Truth be told, this plays out a bit like a soap opera for the most part. There's a lot of relationship stuff, some pathos, and the usual Chinese melodrama with emoting throughout. The action bits are a little better, particularly a grand, large-scale climax which is where all the fiery effects are saved for, but even so I found this to be a film that never rises above the average and remains just a little bit humdrum. A bit more oomph, a bit more effort, and less cliché would have been a good thing.

I find this film very hard to describe. The film is about the firemen at a particular firehouse in Hong Kong. They have a reputation for being jinxed and everyone lives in fear of something terrible happening. Indeed the film opens with the crew going en-mass to the emergency room because they all ate tainted food. As time goes on we watch them as they perform rescues and get on with their lives. Its very soapy stuff, well done but very unremarkable (especially considering who the director is). However about an hour into the film it shifts its focus and becomes 45 minutes of some of the tensest action you've ever seen. Director To amps up our nerves as the group of men and women that we have just a great deal of time getting to know, are now trapped inside a burning factory and they have no clear way out. It will rattle your cage.Its an odd film, and in reality its actually two films the big fire and before. The before stuff is pretty pedestrian stuff and you can pretty much fill in the blanks. However once this film kicks into high gear and the crew is called into action this movie becomes an action classic. Certainly the fire sequence is one of the greatest fire scenes ever put on film. The entire set piece consists of "oh my god"shots as the crew struggles to get out from what is essentially a funeral pyre. Its amazing (and was no doubt cribbed by the makers of Ladder 49). Odds are you'll never have seen anything like this unless you were trapped in a burning factory.If you love action films you have to see the end of this movie. The first hour isn't horrible, but its nothing special.7 out of 10.

This is like Backdraft in Chinese. We follow a group of firemen at a big fire station as they struggle with their loved ones, their bosses, making sense of it all, and of course with fires. The film spends the first 35 min. setting up the character and the story, before you even see the first fire. But this means that once you see the fire, you actually care about those involved in it. Around 60 min. into the story, the firemen arrive at a blazing warehouse, where the rest of the film takes place, as they fight with other stations trying to get the `fire of the decade' under control, and save the civilians trapped inside. I was impressed with the fire sequences in Backdraft when it came out, but this blew me away. There aren't as many fire-scenes as in Backdraft, but they are far more realistic, more often than not resembling the clips you might have seen of actual firemen at work. And what's even more surprising is that it's the actual actors performing the stunts (the DVD contains a small featurette that clearly shows this)! Even when the characters are being helplessly engulfed in flames, as they are running for their lives, it's still them! And I'm not talking about quick cuts, no, you this in slow motion: The actor running, the fire going faster, the fire catching up and swallowing the actor, and just when you think it's all over: the actor, with (apparently) the last breath, jumping clear of the flames and to safety. I would not hesitate to recommend this to anyone who loves Chinese/Cantonese cinema, but also to everybody else. Because this this is a well shot, well acted, well written film, that - in terms of describing the lives of firefighters - are far more