Comparison between the Director's Cut on the French Blu-ray and the Director's Cut on the French DVD.

We have already discussed Tsui Hark's brilliant action drama Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind (aka Don't Play with Fire) in detail in our report between the international theatrical version and the director's cut. The socially critical plot about teenage bombers was targeted by domestic censorship and only a VHS copy still bore witness to Hark's original vision. In the DVD from France compared in the report at the time, the image and audio material from the VHS was incorporated into the significantly better-looking new scan of the theatrical version, while there were otherwise only own evaluations worldwide based on the theatrical version (partly edited: German VHS / British VHS).

The worldwide HD premiere was released in July 2024, again in France. filmArt has already promised a German Blu-ray based on the same restoration, albeit without a release date in sight. One can only hope that the label will not simply adopt the reconstruction of the director's cut now included on the French Blu-ray, but will put its hand to it again. Unfortunately, there are some flaws in the editing, picture quality and sound:

Introductory text panel on the Explosives Act is missing: Quasi the basis of this report, as this DC-exclusive material was apparently forgotten and the version is thus strictly speaking to be classified as cut. The whole explosives theme was the core of various censorship interventions in the theatrical version and so the text panel is clearly an intentional part of the DC.
Forgotten bits of audio censorship: As highlighted in our old report, there are (at least) 8 pure sound deviations, mostly around comments on  explosives. For example, an off-screen radio report about the bombings was replaced by completely different news. On the French Blu-ray, however, only the sound from the theatrical version can be heard alongside the identical picture material in HD. Due to a lack of knowledge of the language, many interested parties will no doubt only be able to understand this through the corresponding subtitles (which, as expected, are unfortunately only available in French on the Blu-ray). Curiously, however, these subtitles correspond to the director's cut and were probably simply taken from the DVD. However, the fact that the correct audio bits are not heard anymore in the new reconstruction and now it no longer even matches the subtitles is evidence of a certain ignorance.
VHS inserts with a significant difference in quality and at the same speed as on DVD: The comparison was made a little more difficult by the fact that the Blu-ray with 24fps and DVD with 25fps have a different running speed, as expected, but the inserts for DC material run at the same speed. This of course raises the question of whether the material on the DVD was encoded incorrectly and ran at NTSC speed despite being in PAL format, or whether this was not correctly adjusted on Blu-ray. However, the higher pitch in the DC scenes clearly indicates an error in the new HD release, i.e. that the VHS footage, accelerated to PAL, was bluntly inserted 1:1 into the 24fps HD scan. Even the volume fluctuates in comparison to the rest of the film and has not been adjusted. Unfortunately, virtually no qualitative improvement was made to the VHS material, making those scenes stand out even more than on the previous DVD release.
Editing errors: As an improvement and "restoration", there was at least the laudable approach of using more existing HD material for short shots within DC scene blocks that are also identical in the theatrical version. For example, there was some trickery when a small strip wandered across the digitized VHS source between two shots. Unfortunately, this also meant that a few moments that correctly appeared in the DC were lost. This was also applied quite inconsistently in some shots (including changes in the middle) and not in others (longer footage missing in the DVD-DC).
Wrong end credits: For the end credits, the DVD again used the VHS source, which had unspectacular, different names such as (roughly translated) "Goodbye" instead of "The End". Similar to the introductory text panel, this probably didn't seem relevant enough to those responsible for the French Blu-ray. So although the better HD quality has been restored here, another small piece of the original version's puzzle has been ignored.
HD picture quality in general: Actually the new HD restoration is quite superior and nice to look at. However, a small haze over the left half of the picture is noticeable in large parts of the film (especially during scenes with light blue skies and many outdoor shots), which was not yet objectionable on DVD.
Great drama? Certainly not for many, but the above-mentioned flaws are certainly annoying and would have been avoidable. It's obvious that the people who were at work here weren't really familiar with the history of censorship for this film. Since no better source was found for the director's cut this time either, this approximation to the original version by Tsui Hark remains a patchwork one way or another. All in all, those who are only interested in the theatrical version will get a reasonable HD upgrade - especially as the numerous framecuts of the DVD scan are fortunately no longer objectionable. We have listed a few longer moments > 0.5 sec in the appendix below. For the Director's Cut, however, it is still better to use the old DVD for a "more complete" and generally smoother viewing experience.