Film Critic: Adrian Martin
It's uniquely powerful in its meshing of this socio-cultural imaginary with the intricate, textual mechanics of modern action cinema. Too often reduced to its bare, supposedly mythic structure by its fans, the film is most fully realised on the smallest, material level of image/sound relations. As Alain Garel wisely argued . . . in 1985, its nearly abstract, kinetic thrust is certainly more historically important, in retrospect, than its more conventional, dramaturgical side.
Adrian Martin
January 1, 1992