A mainstay of Hong Kong action cinema, Philip Ko directed fifty-four films in twenty-two years (including eight films in 1987 and nine films each for 1999 and 2001…). Of course, this prodigious output was in great part due to a resort to patchwork filmmaking – a method he shared with his regular collaborator Godfrey Ho – by which a film is made mostly with disparate bits of stock footage and recycled or unused scenes from other films. Thus a lot many of his fifty-four directorial efforts are near-unwatchable; a few (like Killer’s Romance) are quite solid, and a film like Final Run falls in between. The plot, about corrupt cops working with Golden Triangle drug traffickers and a customs officer getting stuck in the middle, is paradoxically so generic and plodding that it becomes hard to follow. Action is mostly absent for a whole hour, but if one survives that trial by boredom, one is rewarded with a good twenty-five minutes of blistering action. Par for the course, then, for this kind of second rate Hong Kong actioner. The cast is full of charismatic players, most of whom either have extended cameos (Francis Ng keeps a silly grimace at all times as a smug Golden Triangle warlord, Simon Yam is all lazy smarm as a mobster, Leung Kar Yan appears randomly near the end to dish out a few kicks), or supporting roles: Dick Wei gets a rare sympathetic role, and the magnificent Yukari Oshima disappears for fifty minutes, but when she reappears, it’s worth the wait, as she gets some of her most brutal and acrobatic fights – she had a hand in choreographing them, the only time she received an ‘action director credit’. The leads, Cheung Kwok Keung and Michael Miu, make much less of an impression. As was often the case at the time, Harold Faltermeyer’s score to The Running Man is heavily tracked-in. **