I’ve known about Riki-Oh (aka The Story of Ricky) and its supremely over-the-top violence for decades. Whether it was seeing grotesque(ly awesome) moments from the original manga by Takajou Masahiko and Saruwatari Tetsuya, or animated gifs of the most ridiculous scenes from the 1991 Hong Kong movie directed by Lam Nai-Choi, those images stay with a person. When I finally got around to watching that film adaptation, I thought I was ready for what I was about to see. What no one ever told me was just how much Riki-Oh speaks to a nascent prison-industrial complex that has only grown horrifically stronger by 2024.

The opening narration text establishes that Riki-Oh takes place in the future year of 2001, where something horrifying has happened: All government organizations has been privatized, including prisons.

Seeing this made my eyes widen in surprise. When for-profit private prisons plague the United States and treat its inmates in the cruelest ways possible, when Hong Kong itself is having its rights taken away, and when there is actual talk about privatizing state and federal penitentiaries in the US, this movie feels practically prescient. I don’t know how much of this is from the original manga and how much is a quality of the movie, but it’s a hell of an establishing message to put at the beginning.

Then, our hero, Lik-Wong (literally Riki-Oh in Chinese) shows up among the newest batch of convicts. He’s impossibly cool and strong, living with five bullets lodged in his chest and possessing the power to punch people so hard, their body parts explode. To say he’s cut from the same cloth as Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star would be an understatement. But one thing is immediately clear about him: While he is capable of astounding acts of lethality, he would rather there be respect for human dignity, and so tries to show restraint. However, should someone trample on that humanity, Lik-Wong’s willing to give them some consequences for their actions. He believes strongly in peace, but will not preserve a false one in the absence of justice. 

And so Lik-Wong gets into many battles and punches holes in his foes and cleaves their limbs off with the power of his qi gong. He is a manga hero brought to life. But the really interesting portrayals come from the other prisoners, both individually and as a whole. Some are brutal and unrepentant criminals who have gotten in with the equally malicious guards for their own selfish benefit. Others are good people only in there due to a corrupt justice system. Those who are victimized by the prison and its warden, including being used as slave labor for illegal drug production, rally behind Lik-Wong and even gain inspiration to fight back thanks to him. 

But Lik-Wong, for his part, understands that you can’t hold him up as the standard of what a normal person can do. When his fellow inmates resist orders to bury him alive, our hero tells them to do it anyway. They need to avoid incurring the wrath of the warden and stay alive to resist tomorrow. By the end, the prisoners stage a mass revolt while Lik-Wong fights the superhuman monsters that make up the prison’s strongest fighters. Lik-Wong is singularly exceptional, but even he can’t do it alone.

So we’re left with a movie featuring the most off-the-wall feats of dismemberment and disembowelment as performed by a very colorful cast of characters, and underneath it all are some profound questions. Why do we permit the utter dehumanization of prisoners while allowing prisons to profit off their enslavement? Why do we allow people with such an opportunity for corruption to wield such power over people? Sadly, we have no Riki-Ohs or Lik-Wongs in the real world, but we do have the ability to rally around those who believe in compassionate justice that protects the vulnerable, and to work together to make a difference.