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Flashes of the original churn in the memory of the incarcerated racketeer (Li Tung), who turns down an offer of early parole for spying on his gangland mentor (Dean Shek), "a matter of face." The prisoner's detective brother (Leslie Cheung) has no qualms about the undercover assignment, he meets his target at a ballroom event and waltzes with his daughter on bare feet after her high heel breaks. (Dancing is of course not incidental to the aesthetic, as bursts of camera motion lend a sense of continuous sweep long before the choreographed shootouts.) The frame-up by another crime boss (Kwan Shan) is tightly stated with a white lampshade sprayed with splatter à la Hermann Nitsch, the shift from Hong Kong to New York City allows for Chow Yun-fat's riotous entrance, giving a crass Yank a lesson on culture and cuisine at gunpoint: "If you have any dignity, apologize to the rice right now!" The jumbled structure bespeaks the clashing visions of John Woo and producer Tsui Hark, their shared delirium—the sort that can connect gun blasts and shooting stars—carries the action to the very end all the same. Estranged twins crop up, characters slip in and out of catatonic states, tough-guy chatter alternates with the most earnest homilies. "It used to seem so easy to kill someone, yet it seems so difficult to save someone now." Chow's iconic poses from the first film are revived as comic-book panels by a visual artist, youngsters donning his fetishized attire are humorously rebuked by the fraternal restaurateur. "Panache" is the byword, Cheung's brush with an assassin gets intercut with the labor pangs of his wife (Emily Chu), the climactic showdown in a mansion of a hundred henchmen dilates The Wild Bunch with grenade and sword and axe. Tsui purposefully scrapes off Woo's mythic grace for the third installment. With Kenneth Tsang, Regina Kent, Shing Fui-On, Lung Ming-Yan, Ng Man-tat, Lau Siu Ming, and Peter Wang.
--- Fernando F. Croce |