Tag: The Killer

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Features Live Action Movies

The Killer
(Dip Huet
Seung Hung,
喋血雙雄)

Director – John Woo – 1989 – Hong Kong – Cert. 18 – 110m

*****

Having accidentally blinded a nightclub singer in a hit, a gunman takes on one last job to fund the operation to restore her eyesight – back out in a 4K restoration in UK cinemas on Friday, March 20th

Following the success of A Better Tomorrow (1986), this secured John Woo the international interest that would eventually bring Hollywood offers. Woo further distils A Better Tomorrow’s themes of brotherhood, loyalty and betrayal through the device of a cop first facing off against and subsequently bonding with the assassin he’s pursuing; many consider The Killer Woo’s finest achievement.

Professional assassin Ah Jong (Chow Yun-fat) accidentally blinds nightclub singer Jennie (Sally Yeh) with a stray bullet in a hit to become the focus of his guilt. Detective Li Ying (Danny Lee) is trying to catch him.

The backdrop is already familiar Woo and Hong Kong gangster genre territory – triad hits and betrayals, working cops misunderstood by their superiors. The action set pieces rank among the director’s finest: the opening night club slaying, the Dragon Boat Festival hit followed by the fight on the beach, car chases and multi-storey car park shoot outs, all topped by the brilliantly choreographed and seemingly endless final shoot out wherein killer and cop join forces in a church surrounded by unfriendly gangsters.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Zu Warriors
From The
Magic Mountain
(Shu Shan
– Xin Shu Shan Jian Ke,
新蜀山劍俠)

Director – Tsui Hark – 1983 – Hong Kong – Cert. 12 – 98m

*****

One of the greatest special effects action movies ever made, this groundbreaking epic delivers non-stop, near unbelievable, visually entrancing vistas of Chinese mythology – online in the UK as part of Focus Hong Kong 2021 from Tuesday, February 9th to Monday, February 15th and available on Blu-ray

There are films which seem almost single-handedly to define cultures. There are plenty of elements in Zu Warriors From The Magic Mountain that can be found elsewhere in Hong Kong cinema – martial arts stunts, flying wire work, period costumes, stock figures, airborne drapery – and yet the precise way this mixes these elements up then adds in others and adds in lots of 2D effects animation makes it a unique work, even by Tsui’s extraordinary standards.

With the ancient world in which he lives in a state of chaos due to constantly warring human factions, a man gets swiftly out of his depth when he sidesteps all that to follow a hero in the hope of becoming his disciple as the hero battles the forces of evil. If this sounds very highbrow… well, perhaps it is. Or perhaps it’s just an excuse to put together a series of truly extraordinary special effects action set-pieces that transport the viewer to mythological otherworlds the exact like of which have never been seen onscreen before or since.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

ManHunt
(Zhui bu,
追捕)

Director – John Woo – 2017 – China, Hong Kong – Cert. 15 – 109m

*****

Hong Kong action director John Woo’s return to form – currently on Netflix.

The late Japanese actor Ken Takakura who died in 2014 appeared in more than 200 films and made his name playing ex-cons and gangsters for Toei studios between the mid-fifties and mid-seventies. He was a major inspiration for Hong Kong director John Woo who here remakes the 1976 Takakura vehicle Manhunt.

Du Qiu (Chinese actor Zhang Hanyu) finds himself in a Japanese bar swapping notes on movies with the mama-san Rain (Korea’s Ha Ji-won). Almost immediately, a loutish group of men in suits storm into the same bar to demand he leaves so she can give them her full attention. Once he’s gone, Rain and her partner Dawn (the director’s daughter Angeles Woo) proceed to gun down the suits, the camera whirling around them as Woo choreographs the mayhem.

Du is a lawyer working for a pharma company. The morning after a huge corporate event he wakes up to find a dead woman (Tao Okamoto) lying next to him in his bed. Implicated in her murder, he goes on the run.… Read the rest