Director: John Woo
Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Teresa Mo, Philip Chan
Have I Seen It Before: Never.
Did I Like It: How frenetic is too frenetic? Because honestly, there was a long stretch of this where things were moving so fast I wasn’t sure who was working for whom and who was betraying whom, and just how much trouble they might be in because they happen to be working for or betraying certain people. If that’s a satire of witless complexity in American action movies of the time, then bravo. The film played me like a pointedly American fiddle*.
But then the film moves on to a one of the most breathless second halves of any movie, ever. I’m imagining it is this part (pretty much after every main character enters the hospital) with which people have been so enamored for so long. It might feel like a nearly calamitous tone shift when a bevy of defenseless patients are gunned down, even after the equally ruthless Alan (Leung) and Mad Dog (Philip Kwok) declare a truce over that very same issue. It makes me feel sad, when nearly every inch of film at this point in the story is designed to thrill and amuse. There might be a statement about the fundamentally destructive nature of violence in there, but the film forgets them just as soon as they dispose of them.
I enjoyed the experience of watching the film, for the most part, but as I just spent two paragraphs complaining about it, I wonder if I truly did enjoy it. I really want to say yes, because those parts I did enjoy were rapturous, but it is a liking with some severe reservation, and those reservations only come about when I think about the film for longer than a few minutes.
*Or clarinet, if that helps.