I've seen this three times and I love it more each time. I see the nods to spaghetti westerns, to Scorsese (who last year just gave a nod back to Hong Kong for adopting the tone and look of the gangster films he made in the seventies, eighties and nineties), to samurai flicks. It's full of testosterone, the macho code of honor, boyish hi-jinks and barely simmering, under the surface homo-erotic subtext (yeah, you can call it male bonding, I'm calling it the most uncomfortable tag there is). There's so much sexual tension in this movie. Guns as phallic substitutes, a doctor getting it off with a whore (there are two whores? or was she the same one in the hotel?), but the men, they smile in admiration of women, they protect them, they never hurt them, they are gallant to a fault. Yet they can't seem to waste their seed making love to a woman. Their true love is gun-play and their compadres at war. If John Woo has his pigeons, Johnny To has his meals between unlikely comrades. I saw Breaking News, he had a meal there and he has one here too. And the ending. A can of Red Bull goes up, the blazing climax (even in slow motion, surely that's three, four minutes?), the can goes down. Standing ovation!
Review of Exiled
