by ·Comments Off on Executioners (1993, Johnnie To & Ching Siu-Tung)

A quickie follow-up to Heroic Trio codirected by the Chinese Ghost Story guy. Nothing but commercial fluff. I’m not angry about it – Criterion can do whatever they want, and I got to see another Johnnie To movie in nice HD.

In the post-apocalyptic future, Maggie Cheung is a water thief and bounty hunter, Michelle Yeoh is working with the mad scientist trying to revive the supply of fresh water, and Anita Mui is retired with a kid and a politician husband (Paul Chun of Peking Opera Blues). But when the idiot police bring a freshly-captured killer to a press conference with the President (Guan Shan of A Better Tomorrow II) without checking him for bombs first, Anita’s husband is murdered and she’s thrown in jail. Maggie takes care of the kid – the two whiniest characters adventuring together with her rival Mad Detective, who she decides she loves ten seconds before he’s crushed by an underwater gate. Takeshi Kaneshiro’s debut as a charismatic pretty boy used as an expendable publicity tool for the mad scientist. Anthony Wong can’t be seen in this movie since he died so hard in part one, so he plays every deformed masked character. Anita finally breaks out of jail, regaining her powers, and takes on the evil inventor Kim, who was really hoarding fresh water while pretending to be providing it. He accidentally blows up his own iron-fisted superfighter with a grenade crossbow, then extremely kills Yeoh, then gets blow’d up.

Lau “Mad Detective” Ching-wan and Maggie:

Yeoh:

R. Emmet Sweeney for Metrograph:

With Executioners, Ching and To pivot from postmodern comic book to survivalist Mad Max paranoia. They turn the fears and anxieties over 1997 up to 11, detonate a nuclear bomb, and let the trio live in a post-apocalyptic state where most of the drinking water has been poisoned by radiation and survivors are at war for what remains. To claims the sequel was only made to cover the cost overruns of the first movie: “The reason why we produced the second one was because the budget for the first one was very high and we needed to make two films to cover the whole production cost.” Executioners is perhaps more of an accounting trick than a movie, but though it is heavy on exposition it also features moments of crazed creativity — such as Anthony Wong’s unhinged performance as an operatically depressed monster who conspires with the police to hoard water and who keeps the severed head of his unrequited lover (Takeshi Kaneshiro) in a sumptuously appointed leather box.

Anthony:

by ·Comments Off on Vengeance (2009, Johnnie To)

Irene barely survives a violent home invasion, her family killed, her dad Johnny Hallyday (Man on the Train) visits in a Macau hospital and swears revenge. But Johnny’s not an elite killer getting dragged back into the business, he’s just a French restauranteur with a fading memory. He runs across a team of hitmen played by the Johnnie To superstars Suet Lam, Anthony Wong and Lam “Bo in Sparrow” Ka-Tung and they can fit his revenge scheme into their schedule. Of course since their boss is Simon Yam and he barely appears in the first half of the movie, I guessed the (very satisfying) second half would pit our doomed men against their own organization. Since there’s a French lead actor, this was able to play in competition at Cannes, but got robbed by Haneke and Audiard.

by ·Comments Off on The Heroic Trio (1993, Johnnie To)

I tried to discover Johnnie To’s early frontiers with A Hero Never Dies, but succeeded with this one – it’s a Tsui Hark-style HK movie, with the horrible comedy and dialogue and crazy action crystallizing into weird perfection.

Opens with a couple agreeing to buy a neglected, secluded house, the deal interrupted by the supercop husband leaping out a window to catch a thief stealing the realtor’s car. He is Damian Lau (just off the Royal Tramp movies), and doesn’t realize his wife Anita Mui (star of Rouge) is the masked superhero known as Wonder Woman, who’s investigating a wave of babynappings, orchestrated by an Evil Master with growling henchman Anthony Wong.

Meanwhile, friendly bounty hunter Maggie Cheung gets a killer introduction jumping her motorcycle over a cop barricade. And Invisible Woman Michelle Yeoh is… wait, she’s working for the bad guys helping steal the babies, and a baby is killed during the first big fight… this trio isn’t so heroic. But Michelle is sad about her inventor boyfriend dying, and she realizes she’s Anita’s long-lost sister, then they all team up to take down the master.

As a train explodes through a building, a dynamite-tossing Motor Maggie leads the fight vs. flying-guillotine-armed Anthony Wong on a landmine-rigged street. There’s too much awesome, looney tunes shit happening to keep close track of plot details, but Anthony must have survived since he returns in the sequel.

The Visible Woman:

Anthony, before his face gets messed up by the Trio:

by ·Comments Off on Exiled (2006, Johnnie To)

Rented this just a couple weeks ago on a night I knew damn well I wouldn’t have time to watch it. It’s just as good a few weeks later.

During the first half I wasn’t enjoying it so much because I was looking for the wrong things. The characters seemed to have no names or individual traits – just a group of guys who are always in the same scenes together, defined by their commitment to friendship (the backstory consists of one old photo of them together as kids) over loyalty to their mob boss (and therefore their personal safety). I didn’t know the actors (recognized a couple as Chi Wai’s multiple personalities from Mad Detective) and was waiting for the story/character scenes to kick in. But they never do, and now I can appreciate that. The photo is the backstory: these guys are friends… what more do we need for an action flick?

So without character development, we’re left with dark, shadowy cinematography on awesomely-staged action sequences. The one below is a favorite. The fifth friend, whom the other four were supposed to kill on orders from their boss which led them all to revolt, is wounded and being treated by the gang’s private doctor, when the boss himself, also wounded, shows up. He’s being treated, surrounded by bodyguards, while the friends hide behind curtains and furniture, the lead-up to the shoot-out being deliciously more thrilling than the shoot-out itself.

The fifth guy dies, and his wife goes on a shooting rampage against our heroes. They fail to kill their boss, who is now hunting them. They’re on the run and it looks like the movie is gonna break out an existential loneliness dialogue when they stumble upon a heist, a truck full of gold being defended by a cigarette-smoking super-soldier. The movie wasn’t what I’d call realistic to this point, but now it flies off the rails, and they join up with this guy to steal the gold. But narratively it’s not gonna work for the four remaining gunmen to live rich in hiding while their former boss stays in power and their dead friend’s wife raises her new baby alone, so they go back for one more suicidal fight, leaving the gold to the wife and the soldier.

You have to think that guys wearing sunglasses and shooting guns in slow-motion is cool to properly enjoy the movie, and I do, so I loved it by the end. Set in Macau, a former Portuguese colony now in the same political situation as Hong Kong. Nice comic touch: a cop with only a couple days left on the force keeps driving by, getting shot at, and running off unharmed… he lives to see retirement.

–
May 2026: Watched this again and enjoyed the hell out of it, up there with Throw Down in good-natured expectation-subversion, with a Western-reminiscent guitar soundtrack during select scenes (and solo harmonica before the final showdown).

Now I recognize the bosses/baddies: Simon Yam and Gordon Lam (Bo in Sparrow). The old friend who started this whole mess was Nick Cheung, Jet in the Election movies, his (eventual) widow is from Motorway and Dead or Alive 3. The cop who will see retirement is Lau Ching-wan’s boss in the Running Out of Time movies. Of the four main guys, long-haired Cat is the evil alien son of Wicked City, his buddies are Anthony Wong and… y’know, it’s just the entire cast of The Mission. Incredible Red Bull product placement.