This review was previously published on this blog in 2008.
Adultery. Suicide. Murder. Insanity. Drug addiction. Severed arms. Severed Heads. Impaled eye sockets. Acid facials. Attempted infanticide. To name a few.
Sure, it all sounds like the grocery list for some lurid Category III thriller from Hong Kong, or a par-for-the-course exercise in J-horror.
But it's not.
Welcome to Korea, 1967.
The film is A PUBLIC CEMETERY OF WOL-HA, a contemporary-set chiller about a conniving housemaid who keeps her wealthy matron in perpetual sickness in the hopes that her eventual death will free up a little space in her husband's love life...and bank account. While the victim takes the eternal yawn by her own hand, and in abject sorrow and humiliation as befits only the most beautiful Korean tragediennes, payback begins in earnest for her tormentors (and yes, there's more than one!) when her ghost returns home to settle up the bill.
There's some remarkably effective imagery here on what appears to be a modest budget (jazzed up with enough cheap-scare violin shrieks to make then-WKU student John Carpenter proud). One might easily draw visual links to similar Japanese films of the period, but on the basis of this, my first foray into old-school K-horror, I'm tempted to think the Korean shock film industry was vogueing to it's own gruesome beat, one that still reverberates in many of the country's unique modern shockers.
Regardless, Michael Carreras would most definitely have been impressed.
Click through to YouTube via any of the above videos for more clips from this and other amazing (and often rare!) Asian Cinema!
D: Kevin Ko Mang-Yung W: Carolyn Lin Chia-hua, Sung In
Taiwan's first slasher movie brings little innovation to the global form, but replicates the cadence and ultra-gory mechanics of American and European forebears like HOSTEL, SAW, MARTYRS and their kin with such a ruthless efficiency that it's almost forgivable to overlook a comparative lack of indigenous flavor, as well as talking points that might seem profound to the average 18-year-old. Gorehounds will surely be satisfied, at least on the level of technical artistry: this is extremely gooey stuff, well-crafted and glazed in warm, golden-grimy hues by DP James Yuan, about five working class strangers lured—under false pretenses—to an executive networking party for "second generation people" at a secluded, abandoned factory warehouse. They're swiftly "exposed" as unwashed social climbers and subjected to prolonged, torturous executions in front of an appreciative audience of the privileged class, who are sickened by the envy of those beneath them, but not so much so that they can't watch the poor saps have their faces and throats carved open. In short order, the quintet is gruesomely reduced to the resilient "Final Boy" (Bryant Chang) and the resourceful "Final Girl" (Julianne), who navigate a punishing gauntlet of narrow escapes, invasive instruments, corpses and body parts (generally not their own) in order to turn tables and open doors to a sequel. Stunt casting of Japanese hardcore starlet Maria Ozawa will no doubt appeal to her onanistic fanbase, and she photographs beautifully in clothes or out of them, but her acting skills aren't likely to push her further into the mainstream as much as her willingness to disrobe as thoroughly as she does here. Make-up effects by Fei Wen-pin and Huang Ming-chu are every bit the equal of their western counterparts. Director Ko makes his feature-length debut here, after buzzing local film festivals and the internet in 2004 with his impressive horror short THE PRINT.
"Once upon a time, there were three little girls who went to the police academy. And they were each assigned very hazardous duty. But I took them away from all that, and now they work for me."
"My name is Bond. Just Bond"
And these are Bond's Angels.
Chung Wing, Annabelle Lee Hiu-tung, Wong Kit-ying confront a bad man in CRIMINALS
While many fans of the glory days of Hong Kong cinema were, by 1999, bemoaning its dwindling post-handover output and all but writing it off in favour of the latest fads from Korea or Mainland China, someone was making sure the gap between the golden age and the modest resurgence we've been enjoying these past few years was being filled.
Mind you, he filled it with shit, but he still filled it.
His name was Jacky Wong (or as he was more popularly known in the credits of his movies, Jacky Wong), and it was no doubt due in large part to his money, as well as his company, Winners' Workshop, that the HKMDB lists over 40 productions (including plenty of Category III goodies) on which he served as presenter. ALL OF THEM IN 1999! And the HKMDB is still missing several titles from his resume. I know. I see scores of them whilst fumbling through the dump bins.
I suppose this is where I come in. An inveterate and unrepentant bottom feeder when it comes to Hong Kong cinema (or any cinema for that matter, as this blog has likely proven to the three people who read it), I'm all too content to rifle through boxes of two dollar VCDs in Toronto's many Chinese media shops while most normal online Hong Kong cinema buffs are heartily debating the aspect ratios and audio restorations done on the 32nd DVD release of Jackie Chan's POLICE STORY.
Well, I found a different kind of police story. Eight of them, in fact. Which brings us to Jacky Wong's BOND'S ANGELS series. A series most people probably never knew was an actual series, if they even knew about it at all.
Simon Loui, one of the most reliable character actors in Hong Kong cinema for many years, proves himself ever the trooper when flanked by his inexperienced co-stars in WHO'S THE ASSASSIN. It's thanks in large part to the then-ongoing efforts of Loui and his hard-working compatriots that the Hong Kong industry survived the lean years from 1999 to 2004, wherein bottom-of-the-barrel productions like these kept a lot of people gainfully employed. These movies are generally dreadful, it's true, but their importance should not be overlooked. I've had the first entry, SWORD OF DAMOCLES since its VCD debut back in late '99 (from whence springs the first review below). It's not a very good film, and was hardly worth the eight bucks I paid for it. In the years 'twixt then and now, I'd seen the same cast on a handful of very similarly-designed VCD sleeves, but the thought of spending another $56 to complete this possible series was a handy deterrent. But thanks to the good folks at the Wa Yi Trading Co. stores (one downtown, two up north), and their continuing divestiture of old VCD's at rock bottom prices, I've managed to complete the set for the grand total of about $16.
Anyone who's seen even one of these pictures would probably tell me that I paid about $15 too much. I don't know; the series kinda grew on me after awhile, I actually started to care about these girls—especially when spunky Kaka got her leg caught in a bear trap, poor thing—and while I'd rate none of 'em higher than a 3 out of 10 (see below) there's a certain wistful feeling that were it not for the heroic efforts of people like Jacky Wong and his brethren who pumped out shot-on-video product like there was no tomorrow for a good three or four years while Hong Kong cinema was on the verge of extinction, we might not have Hong Kong cinema at all today.
Alright, perhaps that's a bit too wistful—and deluded—but since no website I can find (including the venerable HKMDB or the Hong Kong Film Archive!) has bothered to attach a chronology to all the pieces of the Jacky Wong filmography, I decided to do at least some of the dirty work myself.
And while this series may not have generated a best-selling Farrah Fawcett style nipple poster, or changed the way girls feather their hair, it's not without some merit. Some, I said.
Let's start with...
A SWORD OF DAMOCLES (1999) First of far too many Bond’s Angels video features, a largely interminable collection of straight detective stories from Winners’ Workshop, a prolific outfit better known for an seemingly endless stream of shamelessly padded Category III sex flicks that appear to exist for few reasons beyond providing employment to washed-up 80’s directors and uninhibited starlets of dubious talent, and steady product for a recently-re-opened chain of former porn houses in Hong Kong. In shifting gears for an audience that doesn’t wear trenchcoats, however, the company has divested itself of the only thing worth watching in most of its movies to date: gratuitous female skin, thus making their trademark padding all the more unbearable, even as the production methods have taken a turn for the (slightly) better. When the prized Holy Spirit Sword is nicked from a Hong Kong auction house by thieves working for power-hungry businessman Wong Tin-dok, the security chief assigns its retrieval to Simon Loui’s newly opened private detection agency, consisting of himself and three “Angels,” sporty and sassy Kei-kei (Chung Wing), brainy and sensible Ley-kwan (Annabelle Lee) and bouncy and ditzy Yuk-yee (Wong Kit-ying), who soon uncover a plot—through a laughable amount of intuition and following people around—by the businessman’s aide (Ng Shui-ting) to copy the sword for fun and profit. But the sword has a habit of empowering the worst in those who possess it, causing the audience to view them through green and red filters as they thrust their arms skyward, mad with power. The real saving grace here, (as in the myriad sequels) is the sense of immediacy (not to mention history unaffected by artifice) afforded by shooting virtually without a budget on the real-time streets of Hong Kong in plain view of hundreds of passers-by! Written by the director. Followed by BLOODY LIE. 2.
BLOODY LIE (1999) When his cousin is charged with the murder of a PR girl, Bond (Simon Loui) entrusts his detective Angels (Chung Wing, Annabelle Lee and Wong Kit-ying) to hound a pair of likely suspects—a wealthy playboy (Raymond Cho) and a dirty cop—using their uncanny powers of conjecture, post-hoc reasoning and following suspects around in a conspicuous manner for very long stretches of time. To justify the title, there’s a lie detector scene in this film that runs over twenty-two minutes and extablishes virtually nothing, broken only by a brief sequence of the girls eating lunch and frolicking. By the time the girls are allowed to administer yet another lie detector test to a suspect, and Kiki (Chung Wing) whips out a gun to extract the truth—in a police station!—you’ll be hoping this might be the last Bond’s Angel’s film. But you’d be wrong. Followed by BEWARE OF THE STRIPTEASE. 1.
BEWARE OF THE STRIPTEASE (1999) Evidentally sensing that we needed them after trudging through BLOODY LIE, the Bond’s Angels are back! Resigning from the agency after boss Bond (Simon Loui) notes her gullability in a performance appraisal, private dickette Kiki (Chung Wing) takes a freelance gig searching for the runaway daughter of a successful clothier who bears an uncanny resemblance to the ex-boyfriend who ate a slug from then-rookie-cop Kiki’s pistol after he kicked her around and caused her to miscarry their baby when the then she wouldn’t hush-hush his daddy’s weapons dealing. Surprisingly, it turns out he’s not the same guy—not by a long shot—but it takes the diligent efforts of old pals Ley-kwan (Annabelle Liu) and Yuk-yee (Wong Kit-ying) to convince her that this case goes far beyond a missing teenager. OK entry in the series is typically high on needless exposition and scenes of people walking around, and low on action until the kung-fu finale, but maintains just enough momentum to sustain interest for fans of this kind of video junk. Climactic character twist involving one of the villains is a silly surprise. Incidentally, the “striptease” of the title is largely justified by an unconvincing mash-up of footage with which the director tries to convince us that Kiki is getting loaded in a striptease joing while a caucasian peeler works it onstage. Followed by CRIMINALS. 2.
CRIMINALS (1999) Tasked with finding a politician’s stolen car, Bond’s Angels face a dramatic conflict of interest when boychaser Yuk-yee (Wong Kit-ying) unknowingly falls in love with a key player in the auto theft ring, a suave hood (Teddy Lin) with Ekin Cheng hair on a desperate, murderous climb to the top. Perhaps sensing a dwindling interest in this generally plodding series, production company Winners’ Workshop have paid more attention to the details in this passably suspenseful installment (though they still skimp on the action). The screenplay, for once, holds up reasonably well to scrutiny and thankfully doesn’t require two thirds of the movie to be needless padding, while Wong’s flaky Yuk-yee gets the most shading of any character in the series to date. The cliffhanger ending is also an inspired touch. Followed by WHO’S THE ASSASSIN. 3.
In this scene from WHO'S THE ASSASSIN, the new Bond's Angels extract information from really-super-nice-guy Mr. Ting, played by one of Hong Kong's most venerable players of hissable villainy Karel Wong, whose very presence playing a nice guy in any film should qualify as a spoiler. Notice the deft handling of Wong's lengthy, complicated expository dialogue in this scene.
WHO’S THE ASSASSIN (1999) With one of Bond’s Angels shockingly blown to pieces at the end of CRIMINALS, and Lei-kwan (Annabelle Lee) packed off to the U.S. for cervical cancer treatment in the first few minutes of this followup, ace detective Bond (Simon Loui) pairs insolent, hot-headed Yuk-yee (Wong Kit-ying) with Lei-kwan’s newly-arrived sister Tse-kwan (Miu Yin-wai) to solve the murder that climaxed the previous episode, while new hire Kaka (Cheng Chi-hung), Bond’s niece, gets tangled up with adulterous college flame Marco (Karel Wong), who may very well be the playboy psycho behind the recent murders of two women. Think these two plots will cross? Replacing two main characters in any series is no easy feat, even in no-budget dreck like the Bond’s Angels franchise, but if nothing else, the producers took pains to equalize the range of acting talent across the lead roles—they all suck about the same now, but each deserves at least a few points for trying their best under such catchpenny circumstances. Modest creative gains made in the previous film, and the potential for clever twists, are squandered: in the end, the killer is exactly who you figure it will be despite hoping that the filmmakers have been toying with red herrings along the way. Followed by CRUEL ZONE. 1.
CRUEL ZONE (1999) After countless entries, the Bond’s Angels series finally puts its heroines through the wringer in this followup to WHO’S THE ASSASSIN, the next entry after NUCLEAR WEAPON. Mind you, it’s still a dull slog, but it’s a marginal improvement over many previous installments. Ace detective Bond (Simon Loui), who’s done virtually no detecting of any kind in the series so far, sends the new Angels (Wong Kit-ying, Miu Yin-wai, Cheng Chi-hung) to look after a buddy’s flat on Lantau Island by convincing them it’s a resort vacation (!). Right around the time that Kaka (Cheng) gets her leg caught in a bear trap, it becomes apparent that not only are the locals a wee bit strange, but a psychopath has targeted the Angels because a) Tse-kwan’s sister Lei-kwan put his sister behind bars in BLOODY LIE and b) his wife ran off with a private detective, so he’s just got this thing against private detectives, and he’s selected Tse-kwan as the subject of several days’ torture around the island! Like all of its predecessors, CRUEL ZONE is half-baked with four parts padding to one part plot, and the villain’s plan relies almost entirely on dumb luck, though considering the sleuthing abilities of these gals, that arguably makes it a very clever plan. Followed by CYBER WAR. 2.
In their seventh film, CYBER WAR, Bond's Angels are finally given the opportunity to kick around a few bad guys. With choreography even!
CYBER WAR (1999) Still dazed from her experience in CRUEL ZONE, Angel detective Tse-kwan (Miu Yin-wai) decides its time to head back to the states for some rest. With little work and one less friend in her dayplanner, man-bait Yuk-yee (Wong Kit-ying), suddenly cognizant of how coddled she was by her former colleagues, decides to get involved with computers, ultimately joining a handsome techie (Edward Mok) on a visit to a Beijing computer expo, where the momentary loss of her passport puts her on the FBI’s most-wanted list back in Hong Kong! Now Kaka (Cheng Chi-hung), and Tse-kwan, who just couldn’t stay away for long, must help clear Yuk-yee’s name, which, since the Bond’s Angels series is as cheap in its seventh installment as it was in its first, means plenty of soundless scenes of the girls asking actual strangers for directions (or the time!) in the hopes we’ll be convinced this is anything like an actual investigation! Ranks with CRIMINALS and CRUEL ZONE as one of the better entries in this generally ridiculous series, but that’s not saying much. 2.
NUCLEAR WEAPON (1999) Somebody’s blowin’ up stuff all over the city, and that puts Bond’s Angels on the trail—to love! In this followup to CYBER WAR, Yuk-yee (Wong Kit-ying) swoons for the bumpkin-ish pal of her mainland cousin, while Ka-ka (Cheng Chi-hung) romances an athletic stranger who bumps into her on the street, and Tse-kwan (Miu Yin-wai), ever the sensitive one since her misadventure in CRUEL ZONE, becomes infatuated with . . . the bomber! But it’s cool; he’s a repentent type who’s really being menaced by the man who taught him bomb-making to take revenge on the police for jailing his father years earlier on a trumped-up explosives charge. The Bond’s Angels series goes out on a comparitive high note in this modestly suspenseful (if typically contrived) installment, and finds an ideal Special Guest Star in Chan Kwok-bong as the bomber with a conscious (and a few surprises for the girls). He’s easily the most fully-realized character the series has ever produced, and his presence has a noticeable effect on all three leading ladies. Still, this is probably best enjoyed if you’ve somehow managed to survive the first seven features. 3.
I. C. KILL (1999) D: Mihiel Wong Chung-ning. Y2K jitters conjure up yet another ghost in the machine in this moderately (but surprisingly) witty, suspenseful videogramme that has slacker Michael Tse fearing for his life after roommate Jason Chu intercepts a date with his pretty new internet ICQ chatmate (Liz Kong) and turns up face down at the Ma Liu Shui pier in Sha Tin shortly thereafter. Tech-dumb detective Vincent Wan sizes up the clues, discovers a small chain of victims—including an embarrassed, defensive young female survivor in the hospital—and deduces that the perp is, in fact, a vengeful ghost with a firm deadline for Tse’s departure from the mortal coil. Taking their cue from last year’s phenomenally successful RING pictures from Japan—not for nothing is this film’s bogeywoman named Hiroko—director Mihiel Wong and writer Andrew Wu, who shared these duties between them last year on their debut project B. FOR BOYS, think cinematically on a home video budget and come up with a (very) rough gem distinguished by smart blocking in visually interesting locations—aided in no small part by cinematographers Ng Wing-sin and Lau Wai-kwan, and art director Ginnie Fung Suk-fun (the lamp in Tse’s apartment radiates golden-orange like something from a Wong Kar-wai movie)—and two lead characters that are generally more rounded, both in the writing and the performances, than one usually finds in this corner of the shot-on-video arena. The picture’s most notable asset might very well be it’s unvarnished depiction of computer user interface and online chat sessions (watch the video), something far too many filmmakers unnecessarily “enhance” with phony graphics and sound effects. It should be interesting to see what Wong and Wu are capable of should they return to shooting on film.
THE PLOT (Hong Kong; 1991) D: Chui Chik-lim (as Teddy Yu) Greedy, traitorous Simon Yam usurps the throne of a weapons syndicate, only to contend with freshly-paroled rival Sun Chien and an abundance of undercover cops in the organization (dude needs to run better background checks!). Cheapo actioner strains plausibility at regular intervals, and lacks a strong leading character: puggish Sun Chien and Emily Chu, as one of the cops, vie for the honor but cancel each other out, leaving the impeccably-apparelled Yam to steal the show. Highlight action sequences, co-choreographed by Sun Chien, pit him against a Japanese hitbitch (To Gwai-fa) in a shanty-trashing deathmatch, and the entire cast against each other in a sprawling shipyard shootout that goes on for nearly 12 minutes straight!
While I can't highly recommend it, TUBE is kind of fun, provided you don't think too much about the plot, which has a stereotypical loose-canon cop (Kim Seok-hoon) battling a terrorist (Pak Sang-min) onboard a hijacked subway train. The terrorist is a former government eraser that the government tried, but failed, to erase, and he's taken the train, and Seoul's mayor, hostage to uhh, well . . . to apparently have the plan be doomed from the start.
Equal parts SPEED and THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123, and lesser parts DIE HARD and MONEY TRAIN (the hero's boss does his best crazy Robert Blake impersonation), the film has few pretensions, which make it easy on the derriere, but overall it's a victim of ridiculous logic and a story that begs a few too many questions. Poor Bae Doo-na gets one of the stranger film roles in film history, as a pickpocket who apparently knows she must love the hero even before she knows the hero, and indulges all the necessary Korean histrionics along the way (as well as almost bearing more physical brutality than the hero!) while our glowering protagonist poses with a series of unlit cigarettes in his mouth (and which only one person will ever be allowed to light, care to guess who?).
Production wise, though, TUBE delivers the goods, with slick production values throughout, and some nicely handled chase and fight scenes. Turns out, if I read the docu-stuff on the Korean 2-disc set correctly, that the Korean subway trains don't even look as hi-tech as they do here, and the ones in the film were almost entirely CG apart from the sets for close-ups! Columbia Tri-Star's sleeve is highly reminiscent of the art for TRANSPORTER and, not entirely unexpectedly, substitutes a generic Asian face for that of star Kim Seok-hoon. Nice.
The only reason you'll probably get this movie in the first place!
FATAL TERMINATION (1990) D: Andrew Kam Yeung-wah
Dark, serpentine action thriller, sharply written by Lee Man-choi and Pang Chi-ming, from one of the colony’s most unsung filmmakers. Andrew Kam, co-director with Johnnie To of the Heroic Bloodshed classic THE BIG HEAT (yeah yeah, I know. . .) and, later, the excellent HEART OF KILLER, shows his singular knack for taming an abundance of lead characters and converging plotlines into a lean piece of work.
To hide his middleman dealings with Arab terrorists and a vicious gun dealer (Phillip Ko, who also co-produced) from hound-dog Political Division investigator Simon Yam, dirty customs chief Robin Shou frames, then kills fellow customs officer Michael Miu. The dead man’s sister (Moon Lee, in a career highlight performance) and her husband (Ray Lui), both Special Forces operatives, begin their own investigation, but soon find their lives virtually destroyed by the bad guys.
The movie plays like a nicely stripped down version of some of the great American police corruption flicks of the 70’s, although the Yanks rarely contrived finales in which all the principals go at each other with cars, copters, grenades, machine guns and rocket launchers on an open battlefield! Of interest: FATAL TERMINATION contains one of the most frightening stunts I’ve ever seen in a Hong Kong movie, as a bug-eyed gwailo goon holds Moon’s little girl by her hair outside the window of a visibly speeding car with Moon on the hood desperately trying to punch through the windshield. The story goes that the kid was never in harm’s way and that the “arm” was actually a strong steel contraption, but it still makes for one of those jaw-dropping, “holy shit!” moments that separate the cinema of Hong Kong from any other.
NO MERCY FOR THE RUDE (Korea; 2006) D: Park Chul-hee
Superb production values aside--and really, what Korean movies aren't well made these days?--NO MERCY FOR THE RUDE has a lot of the elements that, when viewed in too many consecutive movies (which can happen in this country's films), tend to shift people away from Korean cinema for short periods of time, and help to explain the terrible financial slump that is plaguing the K-film industry right now. You'd think they could avoid it by mixing genres, but there's often a streak of emotional violence in many (but obviously not all) Korean movies --including comedies--that takes a toll after awhile, and this film has some of that, in addition to some rather cringe-inducing physical violence at odds with it's self-consciously quirky characters.
It's the story of a mute, loner assassin (Shin Ha-kyun, essaying yet another oddball like he did in SAVE THE GREEN PLANET) who lives by his own code of "cool" and dreams of becoming a bullfighter despite being a bit of a bumbler in his profession. His best friend is also an assassin and former ballet dancer who is saving up to buy a warehouse to make into his own studio. Isn't that just quirky and cool? He picks up and beds a sexy bar girl (Yoon Ji-hye) from a favourite post-kill gin joint, and she comes and goes from his life as she pleases, at least until a little street-urchin attaches himself to Shin, at which point a weirdly dysfunctional family is created. Oh, how inventive!
The killer's motto is summed up in the title, as he only kills those who deserve it (of course, the victims are so one-dimensionally sketched that we have to take the filmmakers' word for it that they're really deserving of the grisly deaths they receive). When a hit results in the death of the intended victim's twin brother, the usual volleyballs of revenge start getting served, leading this wannabe black comedy to a typically melodramatic and tragic ending that is almost a foregone conclusion in these kinds of films. Especially the ones from Korea.
Watching this as a double bill with CITY OF VIOLENCE (released the same year as this film; check the archives for a look at the love affair with J&B that it shares with this film) makes for an interesting contrast in styles of on screen physical carnage. Where CITY is cartoonish and winkingly overblown, MERCY marks each kill with the juicy pop of an exit wound or the nauseating (and repeated) "chukks" of knives thrusting into chests and stomachs--all lovingly and realistically recreated in crispity-crunchity DTS and effected as realistically as possible. A flashback scene involving a paid hit on an unsuspecting fisherman is a queasy highlight only because the filmmakers cleverly place the audience in the shoes of the first-time assassin, who (initially) has difficulty with the job because he knows nothing about his scared, misunderstanding victim, and neither do we, which makes it all the more difficult to watch. After that, blood flows with an abject realism but in the end there's no point to anything these self-consciously eccentric characters do, and their fates are made predictable by the very genre!
Some films in the "oddball assassins" genre will take at least modest pains to show the pointless and unrewarding nature of killing and its inevitable consequences, and I guess this one MIGHT be trying to get that across, but I find some of the more effective ones have at least a believable hero worth rooting for: MERCY's hero is practically a byproduct of his own imagination, but he's not even a remotely likable character once you see how viciously he can dispatch targets that usually don't get much opportunity to fight back. Nor is anyone he comes into contact with particularly likable beyond their wardrobes. By the time the festivities climaxed with the by-now de-rigeur Korean blend of melodrama and spitting blood, I found I couldn't have cared less. Always remember, labels out! Yoon Ji-hye and Shin Ha-kyun
Japanese cop Tomoyo Nagase, on vacation in Seoul is held over for questioning after he foils an armored car robbery. Meanwhile, Dawn of Nation, a terrorist organization, plots to disrupt the upcoming Asian summit, kidnapping Japan's Foreign Minister to back up their demands. Tomoyo inserts himself into the investigation of hard-nosed Korean cop Choi Min-soo, an unwavering protocol-follower who teaches him the finer points of Korean etiquette along the way, most often at the receiving end of a punch in the face. Choi himself is saddled with obstructive KCIA guys who regularly overrule his authority. Meanwhile, Tomoyo, against the wishes of his handlers, begins to suspect a link between the terrorists, the robbers and the monolithic Korea Japan Union Bank that could spell a deadly threat to Pan-Asian relationships. Slick, solid thriller with crackling action sequences, and a worthy cousin to the seminal 1999 actioner SHIRI, though one rooted less in Tom Clancy-ish techno-fantasy than that film. Writer Yasuo Hasegawa lightly acknowledges Japan's shameful presence in Korea's history, largely through the character of a wizened Korean noodle-stand proprietor whose Japanese fluency surprises Tomoyo, but then in the film's climactic turning point, in which Tomoyo rescues hostages on a city bus in defiance of Choi's orders (and is ultimately joined by Choi in his efforts), this act of Japanese redemption on behalf of Korean innocents seems tantamount to the Japanese (historical revisionists with the best of them) telling the stuffy, face-saving South Koreans to remove the stick from up their collective ass and get over themselves. A minor quibble, considering the film's general intelligence and quality in the face of so many cop thriller genre clichés. Trimming a few of the film's multiple denouements might have helped, though.
THE EXODUS (Hong Kong/China 2007) D: Edmond Pang Ho-cheung.
The opening shot, a slow, meticulous dolly backwards down a hallway, says it all. It begins with a tight closeup of a pair of alluring female eyes in a photograph. The subject of the portrait is revealed to be Queen Elizabeth II, and beneath it stand two men in swim trunks, goggles and flippers who light up smokes and casually redirect a Hong Kong police officer who has unwittingly entered the doorway at screen left. These must be cops, pre-1997, and as the frame continues to open up, we notice two, then three, then four of these "frogmen" beating a suspect with mallets and phone books as he struggles violently to flee.
"All the hatred of this world are caused by men," claims one of the film's female characters, but as evidenced by this gorgeous opening shot, much of it happens under the watchful eye of condoning women, and in pondering the question of why the female almost always outlives the male, as well as what they talk about when they go to the ladies' room together, writer-director Edmond Pang, along with co-writers Cheuk-Wan-chi and Jimmy Wan Chi-man, have crafted a sleek black comedy that, strangely, doesn't manifest most of its inherent dark whimsy until well into the final reel.
Nagged by a condescending mother-in-law who only sees value in a man who runs his own business, and long ago demoted to a desk job as a reward for interdepartmental whistle-blowing, bored and complacent Tai Po police sergeant Simon Yam—who we later learn was the redirected officer in the opening sequence—begrudges a favor to a fellow officer and agrees to take a statement from a peeping Tom (Nick Cheung), who foams profanely about a top-secret organization of women plotting the elimination of the male species, one unsuspecting rube at a time. Yam thinks little of it, until the report disappears from the evidence room and the suspect one-eighties his story after a visit from a prickly female senior officer (Maggie Shaw). Eager to learn why such a patently ludicrous story would need to be hushed up, he soon comes to the realization that Cheung was telling the truth!
Artfully directed and photographed (by Charlie Lam Chi-kin) with an emphasis on static, contemplative frame compositions the seem to grow organically from the modernist yoga-zen architecture that dominates the locations, but the concept begs for a playfulness that the filmmakers seem to avoid until the last ten minutes of the picture. The build-up is played with such a straight face that sequences which all but confirm the existence of the assassination club pass with nary a raised eyebrow. Perhaps that was the point, but the shift in tone is nonetheless jarring. Yam underplays nicely throughout, as if his character knows all too well how ridiculous his mission might seem to those looking in. Fine music score by Gabriele Roberto features exceptional piano solos by Aiko Takai.
