"Give a guy a gun, he thinks he's Superman. Give him two and he thinks he's God."A tough-as-nails cop teams up with an undercover agent to shut down a sinister mobster and his crew. REVIEWA maverick Hong Kong detective is on the trail of some gun-running Triads, and gets mixed up with a dangerously unstable
undercover cop who has infiltrated the mobsters.This is a love-it-or-loathe-it type of picture. Whilst the plot may be a little thin and the visuals occasionally veer wildly into pretension, this is undoubtedly the most stylish bullet-festival ever committed to celluloid. It has three stunning set-pieces; a shootout in a dim-sum restaurant, a shootout in a warehouse and an, er, shootout in a hospital. The hospital sequence, which lasts nearly an hour, is simply an amazing piece of action choreography, which tops anything done before or since. In one single two-and-a-half-minute tracking shot alone, Yun-Fat and Leung race down endless corridors, take a ride in an elevator, waste twenty-eight different bad guys along the way and act out a dramatic scene whilst doing it, stunning. Woo (who has an unbilled bit as a bartender) has an incredible eye for action, aided by top-notch stuntwork from Kwok, who also plays the aptly-named chief henchman, Mad Dog. Wang Wing-Heng's zippy, fluid camera-work and the groovy keyboard score by Michael Gibbs round off the perfect Cantonese gangster movie. Somehow, amid all the chaos, Yun-Fat and particularly Leung manage to lend some dramatic pathos to their roles. It's asking a lot of an actor, surrounded by villainous henchman in a burning hospital, to hold a shotgun in one hand and a baby in the other and sing it a rap lullaby, but Yun-Fat pulls it off!
April 14, 2009
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