From the plot description on the DVD cover and Andy Lau's dominance of the cover art, you might think that The First Time is the Last Time is your usual Hong Kong late 80's undercover cop drama. However, it is actually a women in prison film, one that's closer in tone to Ringo Lam's gritty and violent Prison on Fire than the sexy and exploitative fare one usually associates with the genre.

Like many prison-based movies, The First Time centers on a "new fish", who in this case is Ma (Season Ma), who was sent to the jug for unknowingly hiding drugs for her spineless Triad boyfriend, Robert, who promises to make sure Ma doesn't get hurt as long as she "takes care" of Winnie (Carrie Ng). However, Ma soon begins to bond with Winnie, especially after hearing her story about a romance with an undercover cop (Andy Lau) gone wrong.

It is in these flashback segments where The First Time stumbles. Subscribing to most every stereotype in the undercover cop genre, they are often plodding and melodramatic, shoehorning in musical montages to substitute actual character development. A lot of the failure of these sequences is due to Andy Lau, who frankly was not doing very good work at this point in his career. Some of this could be attributed to overwork -- Lau appeared in fifteen other movies in 1989, as well as several TV series, not to mention his Cantopop output -- but Lau didn't seem to give the strength (or lack thereof) of his acting output too much importance.

However, when The First Time concentrates on the prison, and the drama, relationships, and conflicts within the walls, it's quite good. In particular, Carrie Ng (in a performance that earned her a Hong Kong Film Award nomination) shines throughout the movie, making the scenes she's involved in a joy to watch for the most part. If the film-makers were more confident in their base story and didn't feel the need to shoehorn Lau into the proceedings to try and bring up the box office receipts, The First Time probably would have been a much more successful picture.

RATING: 6