Johnnie To has built a cottage industry for himself making violent and complicated gangster films that are kept afloat with style and subtle humour. Sometimes the ratio of these qualities is altered: eg. with "Fulltime Killer", there was more humour and less style, and in "The Longest Nite", less humour and more violence.
"Exiled" is the first of To's movies I have seen that is completely without one of these ingredients, which I would have thought as vital as the others. There is no humour in To's film. Perhaps to make up for this, the style has been amped up to the nth degree. The movie is so stylishly shot it is like looking at a photography book. The fact that the actors don't do much adds to this effect.
Indeed, the movie mostly shows gangsters hanging around smoking, wearing sunglasses and looking cool. Then they burst into action and start shooting at each other, which always seems to happen either in slow or fast motion. The movie shows a possible evolution of HK crime (or heroic bloodshed) movies: there are no gushing gunshot wounds here, but rather an over-use of red mist every time someone takes a bullet.
The story is basically the same as To's earlier work, "The Mission". A group of hit men are hired to do some job or other. They spend a lot of time in each other's company, though apparently not enough for us to really care about them, or believe they care about each other. I guess there is a double cross (isn't there always) and so a lot of people get shot. Among them there is the legendary Anthony Wong, who played basically the same character in "The Mission", and Simon Yam, who for once plays a Triad rather than a cop.
I have mentioned that this movie is like a photography book, and so it is. We admire the photography, and the actors who are dressed and posed to blend in with the backdrops. To's action scenes have always been more Takeshi Kitano than John Woo, but whereas Kitano's painterly compositions erupt into violence so abruptly you feel like you are the one being attacked, To seems to want to handle violence in such a way that there is minimal change to his viewer's pulse-rate. The result is one of few violent gangster films you can fall asleep watching.
"Exiled" is the first of To's movies I have seen that is completely without one of these ingredients, which I would have thought as vital as the others. There is no humour in To's film. Perhaps to make up for this, the style has been amped up to the nth degree. The movie is so stylishly shot it is like looking at a photography book. The fact that the actors don't do much adds to this effect.
Indeed, the movie mostly shows gangsters hanging around smoking, wearing sunglasses and looking cool. Then they burst into action and start shooting at each other, which always seems to happen either in slow or fast motion. The movie shows a possible evolution of HK crime (or heroic bloodshed) movies: there are no gushing gunshot wounds here, but rather an over-use of red mist every time someone takes a bullet.
The story is basically the same as To's earlier work, "The Mission". A group of hit men are hired to do some job or other. They spend a lot of time in each other's company, though apparently not enough for us to really care about them, or believe they care about each other. I guess there is a double cross (isn't there always) and so a lot of people get shot. Among them there is the legendary Anthony Wong, who played basically the same character in "The Mission", and Simon Yam, who for once plays a Triad rather than a cop.
I have mentioned that this movie is like a photography book, and so it is. We admire the photography, and the actors who are dressed and posed to blend in with the backdrops. To's action scenes have always been more Takeshi Kitano than John Woo, but whereas Kitano's painterly compositions erupt into violence so abruptly you feel like you are the one being attacked, To seems to want to handle violence in such a way that there is minimal change to his viewer's pulse-rate. The result is one of few violent gangster films you can fall asleep watching.