Dir. John Woo, Hong Kong, 1990, 130/136 mins, subtitled
Cast: Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Jacky Cheung, Waise Lee, Simon Yam
Review by Colin Dibben
When a local crime boss asks them to smuggle a suitcase to Vietnam, three young guys seize the chance to escape Hong Kong. With the Vietnam War in full swing, there are opportunities to get rich quickly in Saigon. But just like back home, powerful gangsters call the tunes. Soon, the trio are on the run again with another suitcase, this time full of stolen US Army gold bullion.
Will their friendship survive the mad allure of treasure?
This is the John Woo film that oozes a sense of history, both personal and political. It recreates the Hong Kong of his own youth, plagued by violent anti-colonial civil unrest, especially the riots of 1967. The film also looks forward in one scene to the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.
Stylistically, there are also nods to the film context adjacent to which Woo matured as a film maker: the Hong Kong New Wave and film makers such as Ann Hui, Patrick Tam, even the early films of Wong Kar Wai.
In terms of sentiment, too, with its epic sweep, music and its borderline nostalgic tale of friendship and brotherhood betrayed by violence and greed, the film owes much to Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in America.
If you are a fan of John Woo’s films, you will notice one big difference here – the editing, which is much choppier here throughout, not just in the set piece action sequences.
This is because Woo’s original cut was over 3 hours long and the distributor asked him to cut it to under 2 hours. As one of the extras says, Woo walked out of the editing suite at 4am “to buy some shirts” when it got down to choosing the last 20 minutes to cut. He couldn’t face it and left it to the editors. The distributor appears to have destroyed all the cut footage.
Woo is famous for building action sequences out of hundreds of edits, creating a sense of environment and action through cross-cutting footage from several cameras set up around the set. Here, however, the action sequences are relatively muted: there are less edits and their effect is not as powerful. The film tends to cut to close-ups of the leads and you don’t see a lot of those cool camera glides that open up a sense of the environment in which the action is taking place. I assume, once again, that time, money and cuts account for the difference.
While the POW camp sequence in which our un-heroic trio are tortured by their captors is disturbing and powerful, its action climax strikes a bum note: Woo used stock footage for US helicopters and the firestorm they unleash and the gung-ho presentation of American involvement comes across as odd.
The Arrow Video limited edition release comes in a choice of two, 3-disc packages, one featuring the film on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, one in standard Blu-ray format. The features and extras are the same for both packages.
Features include:
- A theatrical cut of the film
- A festival cut of the film
- Six postcard-sized reproduction artcards
- Collectors’ perfect-bound booklet featuring new writing on the film by critics Priscilla Page and Sean Gilman, archival writing by critic Arnaud Bordas and an excerpt from an interview with John Woo conducted by Stéphane Moïssakis
- Brand new audio commentary by film critic and Hong Kong cinema expert Frank Djeng
- Deleted and extended scenes
- Brilliance with a Bullet, a brand new interview with director John Woo
- The Long-Suffering Siu-Chun, a brand new interview with actor Fennie Yuen
- Head Case!, a brand new interview with actor Waise Lee
- Army of One, a brand new interview with regular John Woo collaborator Terence Chang
- Apocalypse Woo, a brand new interview with editor David Wu
- Tumultuous Times, a brand new interview with associate producer Catherine Lau
- Hong Kong Confidential: Inside Bullet in the Head, a brand new interview with author and Hong Kong film expert Grady Hendrix
- Apocalypse How, a brand new interview with author and historian Dr Lars Laaman
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