Winners & Sinners Blu-ray Review

Cleaning Cares Away

Winners & Sinners is notable not for its story (it barely has one) but a ludicrously dangerous, flashy, and chaotic chase scene right at the hour mark. At that stage, Winners & Sinners still hasn’t settled into a plot, so it relies on Chan – in little more than an extended cameo role – to don skates, skitch after a criminal’s car, then cause a 50 car pile-up that is among the best ever filmed.

Winners & Sinners is free to do whatever it wants, never tethered to reality or the central story

After that, Winners & Sinners finally admits guilt: it needs a story, so in comes a loosely threaded tale about stolen counterfeit bill printing plates, a briefcase, and five ex-convicts caught in this high-crime scheme. There’s help in the form of director/star Sammo Hung’s comedy, starting from the opening frames when he’s accosted for not being Sammo Hung. That self-awareness is needed to keep some coherence as Winners & Sinners devolves into numerous skits, utterly devoid of story momentum.

It is funny, even if the loose timing dings a few otherwise successful jokes. There’s fun watching Richard Ng, convinced he’s invisible by friends/co-workers, dances around the room naked. Another sequence has this team, operating their cleaning service, sticking Hung with the work and lifting. Preposterously coincidental meetings play into the fourth wall-shattering tone, plus allows the action to do almost anything, no matter how absurd. Winners & Sinners is free to do whatever it wants, never tethered to reality or the central story.

Staggered character development takes ages to see through though, and it feels as if Jackie Chan’s highlighting action piece is there as an admission Winners & Sinners needed to do something for the audience. While the camaraderie between the misfit crew brings mild joy, the misshapen pacing is too much to overcome. Winners & Sinners is better watched in chunks for the best material, the rest left discarded. The result as a whole is as directionless as the character’s lives post-jail.

Video

Content and clean, Winners & Sinners satisfying, even recently done master shows a well handled, preserved grain structure. It’s sharp enough to indicate a likely 2K scan, the detail flourishing given the encode’s ability work with the source grain.

Surprisingly vibrant color enhances flesh tones, then nicely dabbles in raising the primaries. Reds show special extravagance.

The only whiff comes back to the flatter black levels, and that is more likely the overexposed source. Shadows fail to achieve any density, resting at a flat gray. Thankfully, contrast doesn’t suffer any similar problems, remaining bright, rich, and bold.

Audio

Five (!) audio tracks show in the menu. Defaulting to Mandarin DTS-HD mono, additional choices include two Cantonese mono tracks, an English dub mono, and the only compressed track is a Mandarin 5.1 mix that’s at best sloppy.

Fuzzy, dated dialog accompanies each track, revealing the source material’s age. The soundtrack adds a slight range, but this is otherwise all early ’80s material and that’s audible whether knowing the release date or not.

Extras

Author David West brings his knowledge to the project via commentary. Other bonuses include a new interview with Dr. Luke White, two older interviews with Sammo Hung, a Hung featurette, outtakes, and finally, multiple trailers, foreign end credits, and stills.

Full disclosure: This Blu-ray was provided to us for review. This has not affected the editorial process. For information on how we handle review material, please visit our about us page to learn more.

The following six screen shots serve as samples for our subscription-exclusive set of 41 full resolution, uncompressed HD screen shots grabbed directly from the Blu-ray: