In short: Taxi Hunter (1993)

Original title: 的士判官

Mild mannered insurance salesman Ah Kin (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang) seems to have regular run-ins with Hong Kong taxi drivers. As the film portrays them, taxi drivers are basically a gang of greedy scammers and rapists, and Ah Kin is so good-natured, he is an obvious victim for any bully. When his pregnant wife (Perrie Lai Hoi-San) dies in a brutal taxi driver caused incident, Ah Kin at first falls into a deep hole of depression and alcohol not even his best friend, hero cop Yu Kai Chung (Yu Rongguang) can get him out of.

He gets somewhat better when he throttles yet another asshole taxi driver in a spur of the moment loss of sanity. Made somewhat happier by the deed, Ah Kin starts on a new side-line as a serial killer, punishing taxi drivers with bad professional ethics whenever he encounters them. He’s rather realistically not really great at physical violence, so much so he’ll eventually buy a gun to make kills meet.

If you go into Herman Yau’s serial killer movie Taxi Hunter expecting something as dedicated to the gross-out as the director’s The Untold Story (made in the same year as this one, also starring Wong) or his later Ebola Syndrome, you might be somewhat disappointed by this one’s often consciously awkward and comparatively quiet violence. Yau actually has quite a talent for staging more awkwardly realistic action in a dramatic and exciting way, and he uses this ability to pull the serial killer thriller down on the level of the human.

In fact, Taxi Hunter’s greatest strength does not lie in its moments of suspense and mild horror – expertly as Yau works them – but in the way the film has a humanizing view on each of its main characters, showing so much – often unexpected - compassion for Ah Kin, his best friend who is of course the cop tasked with catching the taxi hunter, Kai Chung’s comic relief partner (Ng Man-Tat), and the partner’s reporter daughter (Athena Chu Yun), the whole film ends up playing like a tragedy much more than your typical serial killer or revenge movie. Unless you’re a Hong Kong cab driver, then you’re apparently just an asshole (though killing you is still wrong, as Kai Chung will explain).

This unexpected amount of humanism is packaged inside of a fast-paced Hong Kong thriller that flows so well, for once even the comedic interludes fit.