Riki-Oh: Buff and Tuff with a Heart of Gold

Ngai Choi Lam’s wonderfully campy action film Riki-Oh: The Story of Riki (1991) lets you know what it is almost immediately. The protagonist, Riki, steps off a bus and into intake processing for new inmates in a Chinese prison. The metal detector goes off and two guards instantly swing batons at his skull. No questions. Riki blocks both batons with his forearms. Oh, he’s tuff. Then he pulls his shirt open. Oh yeah, he’s buff too. There’s a medical x-ray machine right there, which is how we find out he’s got many bullets buried in his torso and that they were what set off the metal detector. The guards immediate concern provides narrative exposition: “Why didn’t you get them removed?”

Close up on Riki, “They’re souvenirs.”

*Gasp* Just the right amount of bad boy.

A hero is only as good as his villains, though. When we meet the Assistant Warden of the prison, he’s got a wall full of pornographic VHS tapes behind his desk and tries to blackmail Riki with a picture of a girl. We never really figure out who she is but we do know that Riki thwarts the attempt by using his qigong to give the Assistant Warden a nosebleed. He brings the picture back to his cell, sits on the floor and—I swear to god—pulls out a flute. Cue a heartwarming flashback. Not a bad boy when it comes to her.

Who is she, though? His sister, probably. Riki is an innocent guy whose sister (probably) is driven to suicide to avoid being violated by thugs. When he finds and kills their boss, he ends up in prison. 

Heightening this premise is the aesthetic of the movie. Lam made this film at the perfect time where it could be both an 80’s B-movie in its tone and a 90s movie in its visual simplicity. There’s an opening crawl which gives you the prologue, the characterization happens with one-liners, and a synthesizer playing over somber night lighting lets you know a character flashback is imminent, like films in the 80s. Meanwhile the costumes and sets tend to have a lot of solid colors, both bright and pastel, like films in the 90s. These observations taken into context of the muscular, hypermasculine Americana that dominated the still somewhat contemporary 80s, might indicate that Riki-Oh was intended to be a Chinese response to America’s cultural hegemony, with its own modernized vision of Chinese muscular hypermasculinity in 1991. The American version of this type of hero usually involves a man who derives his virtue from rugged, individualist morality, while Riki derives his virtue from popular, collectivist traditionalism. The American hero fights for love with nothing but raw determination, while the Chinese hero fights for justice with his heritage of qigong (chi).

There’s also this power structure within the prison. First, there are cliques of inmates at the bottom, bullying other inmates. Then there is the Gang of Four, four kung fu heads of security that administer discipline on all of the prisoners. They report to the Assistant Warden, who reports to the Warden. And every step up, the kung fu gets stronger. 

This movie is loaded with campy stylistic bits, like when we get a shot from Riki’s POV at the boss of the East Wing, looking directly at the camera, with a smug eyebrow raised, using her fingers to signal him to bring it on. Somewhere in Riki’s struggle through the ranks of this power structure, during one of these campy moments, you realize it. This movie isn’t a movie. This movie is a video game! This aesthetic, this character design, and this plot movement is something you’d see in an 32-bit arcade game.

When Riki begins his series of encounters with the prison’s formal power structure, he finds the boss of the North Wing sitting on top of a cross that he’s used to crucify one of the inmates that was sick of all the corruption. The prison literally crucifies one of the inmates to send a message to Riki about what happens when you fight their corruption. And in case you’re wondering—yes, North Wing boss is tuff and buff. Point being, though, he’s a mini-boss!

Then, in proper arcade game tone, when Riki defeats the mini-boss, Riki somehow ends up seeming more like Jesus by helping down the guy who was crucified than the guy who was crucified actually does. It’s literally Riki’s first concern as he’s being taunted by the other bad guys. Tuff and buff, with a heart of gold. 

At this point, you might be thinking, “Man these bad guys really suck. What’s their deal?” Well, they’re a bunch of corrupt capitalists! This movie is a critique of a privatized prison-industrial complex. It tells you as much in the prologue in the beginning. This movie’s basically The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Now, in any society, you (at least) go to jail for murdering someone, whether or not they deserved it. That’s not a feature of capitalism so much as it is a feature of any human justice system. And it’s the same for organized crime. Thugs operating outside the law aren’t unique to capitalism. But in the thinking of a propaganda film, the thing you’re rallying the people against has to be responsible for the complete and total moral decay of society. Capitalism is the reason crime exists, and when innocent people need to resort to desperate things, it’s the reason the justice system fails. Riki is an individual of exceptional moral character, which when combined with his exceptional strength, contrasts him with the moral detritus left in the wake of the power-hungry corruption that surrounds him. Thanks, Capitalism! All-in-all, this movie might be the best propaganda film of all time. Better than Sanshiro Sugata (1943) and better than Battleship Potemkin (1925). Neither of those films had a scene where a dude commits seppuku in order to use his own intestines to strangle someone else.

If you’re wondering why I waited until the end of the article to mention the anti-capitalist point of the movie, when the movie itself tells you in the beginning, then I’ll leave you with my exact quote after Riki-Oh’s ending scene. Riki beats up all the bad guys. He’s tuff enuff and buff enuff. The prisoners rejoice and Riki punches down the wall separating the prisoners from the outside world. Wait, he could’ve just done that the whole time?

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