It's easy to see why so many people have written books about Hong Kong filmmaking. After all, while the avarice and incompetence that characterize Hollywood have been well-documented, the world of Hong Kong film is exhilarating new territory--fast, furious, and hyper-kinetic. Lisa Oldham and Michael Hoover's City On Fire is an admirable but tremendously flawed attempt to dissect the world of Hong Kong film from a primarily Marxist political and sociological perspective. It's an interesting goal, but Hoover and Oldham too often end up desperately overreaching, trying to glean serious political and metaphorical meaning from things as silly and apolitical as individual stunts performed in a Jackie Chan film. This tendency to analyze everything in terms of its relationship to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from Great Britain to China is the biggest flaw in an otherwise entertaining book. Tracking Hong Kong film from its early days to its '80s heyday to its current state of decline, the authors convincingly argue that foreign competition, flight among top filmmakers, and the cutthroat world of late-period capitalism have turned the industry into a shadow of its old self. At the same time, their clunky and seemingly arbitrary use of Marx's work--it seems as if the authors were contractually obligated to quote him at least every 10 pages--detracts from their argument, at times rendering the book dry and academic. City On Fire is always readable, but those looking for an introduction to Hong Kong filmmaking not weighted down with political and ideological baggage are better off looking elsewhere.