Despite the shaky start, where the violence escalated too far ahead of the investing camp elements and narrative engagement, I'm pleased to report that the film quickly established itself as a lampoon on general action cinema from the west and eat, particularly aiming its weapons inward at the superheroic protagonists in these features.
#Hk cat iii movie movie#
Riki-Oh/Story of Ricky: After a classic 80s B-action movie setup (complete with the repetitious 'dramatic' scoring), I became worried that this would be nothing more than a vacuous Takashi Miike inspiration, an indolent venture into the grotesque that didn't earn its perversity with any bearings beyond its Because We Can brutality. The sequel, Executioners, is maybe more relevant now, with the same heroes in a sort of "after the bomb" fascist country where the stakes are much higher. In retrospect, it seems more of a Ching Tsiu-Tung film (he is the co-director) than a Johnnie To picture. Now it still features some remarkable material you wouldn't see in other movies (Maggie Cheung dynamites a bunch of children, for instance) and a lot of fun visuals. Back then, it was about the most comic-book-y movie one might ever be able to see. Personally, I never cared much for the romantic comedies, but there are a couple of weird outliers which are pretty interesting–– The Barefoot Kid, a martial arts movie set in a pre-republican era and focused surprisingly on the economic exploitation of a talented martial artist, and The Heroic Trio, which was probably more special before the worldwide takeover of superhero films. And there are some terrible ones–– Chasing Dream, Where a Good Man Goes, Fulltime Killer, and The Enigmatic Case. There's what I would call a sort of second tier, which are films I didn't connect with so personally, but which I thought were really good–– Throwdown, Election I, Office, Exiled, Life Without Principle, Breaking News, Three, A Hero Never Dies, Running on Karma. It is a fascinating film, though, in that it goes quite far to clarify each director's style and interests in comparison to one another. I like Triangle a lot, but that movie––a film in which Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To each handle one of the film's acts, re-writing and renovating the movie as they each see fit, really shouldn't be anyone's second or third Johnnie To movie. It is one of the earliest blu rays released in Hong Kong, so of course it's also long out of print.įollowing those, my favorites are probably Sparrow, Vengeance, Drug War, PTU, The Fun, The Luck and the Tycoon, and Blind Detective. There is a Mei Ah blu ray which contains the HK theatrical cut of the film, which is, to my mind, a lot better. Mad Detective has a blu ray from Masters of Cinema, but the blu ray contains an international cut of the film which, though Johnnie To seems to prefer it, I think removes a really meaningful––even necessary––valence from the film.
The Mission had one good DVD release, in France––now long out of print (and without English subtitles, to boot).
Wouldn't you know it, both are relatively hard to see.
I would say the movies that got me most excited about Johnnie To movies were The Mission and Mad Detective.
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