MUBI

John Woo’s gloriously over-the-top gun melodrama all but revolutionized action film-making when it was seen in the west in the late 80’s, but with it’s explosions, romantic music, slo-mo death scenes, incomprehensible violence, and unabashedly melodramatic characterizations, it’s business as usual for Hong Kong. Chow Yun Fat and Danny Lee play cat and mouse as a contract hit man and the obsessed detective out to get him, but beautiful blind singer Sally Yeh softens their hearts, and an odd friendship plays out against a storm of gangster guns looking to erase Fat from the scene. Woo loves the idea of perfect, everlasting friendship and brotherhood transcending hit contracts and gangster blood oaths, and there are relationships of that kind all over the plot, but the thrill of the film remains in the laughably violent gun play, which is treated in balletic fashion. On the Blu-ray interview Woo suggests a kinship with Melville, Scorsese, and Peckinpah, and I’d say on some level, a more sympathetic, romantic Seijun Suzuki.