Review: HEROES SHED NO TEARS was filmed by John Woo way back in 1984 but was shelved by the Golden Harvest Studio who thought that the film - by their top ‘comedy director’ at the time - was too violent. When A BETTER TOMORROW was a smash hit only two years later HEROES was dusted off of the shelf and released.

Eddy Ko takes on the starring role in HEROES as Chan Chung, a grizzled war-veteran who’s dedication to the mission in hand is absolute. Chung wants to provide a better life for his son and there’s a fair amount of screen time shared between the two of them. Ko has a fairly expressionless face which works well in this role managing to look both deadly serious and a hard bastard - and with the trials and tribulations that his character is subjected to he’s hardly going to be grinning. Sometimes scenes with child actors can be awkward but Ko seems totally at ease in these and they play very well. While Chan Chung is not a particularly well developed character (a flashback scene serves to explain some of his military background and a friendship, but little else) the rest of the gang of mercenaries fare even less well. If the key to a film in which a group of people have to work together as a team is to distinguish each of your main characters clearly, then HEROES SHED NO TEARS fails quite early on. None of the other team members is given much else to do other than walk around shooting guns, slinging grenades and only occasionally (which is surprising considering the amount of lead flying around) get shot. After the first big climax of the film instead of trying to solidify just who any of the other team members are, the film suddenly veers off into two bizarre comedy scenes. These scenes are quite amusing but they don’t serve the film well as they provide a jarring change of tone. Instead of personalising two of Chung’s gang they’re cheap laughs and manage to highlight them as a couple of buffoons.

Lam Ching-Ying makes a noticeable entrance as a Vietnamese General whom Chung and the gang manage to annoy in a very bad way - which is clearly not the cleverest thing to do. Lam Ching-Ying portrays menacing characters very well and here his cold stare works well on-screen alongside Eddy Ko’s hard, expressionless face. Unfortunately Ching-Ying’s General is a cartoon-like character as his single-minded pursuit of Chung veers towards the ridiculous. Of course, Lam Ching Ying is always watchable, but his role highlights just how flawed the material is.

Another character the fleeing group manage to stumble across is an American war-veteran played by Philippe Loffredo. It’s at this point in the film that it makes it’s most unnecessary detour into a ‘drugs and sex’ scene that may be at home in a different style of war film (as seen in plenty of U.S. films about the Vietnam war), but in a Hong Kong production like this feel totally out of place and exploitative. Along with the earlier comedy scenes, this section of the film serves to alienate us in time which could have been better spent developing and characterising the group in order for the inevitable climax to make more of an impact.

HEROES SHED NO TEARS is a cheap genre movie by anyone’s standards. The script is severely under-developed, the pace is very uneven and some of the acting is bad to say the least. The film is very violent and it’s quite graphic in a way that is different to Woo’s later films, as it often lingers on particularly gruesome shots. HEROES obviously manages to attain some interest by being an earlier work of it’s director, and John Woo himself considers the film to be the first into which he managed to tap into with his personal style. There are plenty of elements in the film which are recognisable in his later work - for example the use of P.O.V. and tracking shots, the energy of the camera during action scenes as well as the use of slow-motion and some of the more melodramatic moments in the performances. For viewers familiar with Woo’s later work this is worth a recommendation, and the presence of Eddy Ko and Lam Ching-Ying provide just enough credibility to the production to overlook some of it’s most basic flaws.