The Hong Kong shoot lsquo;em up is a highly stylized and precisely perfected subgenre of action films made most famous by the films of John Woo including near classics such as Hard Boiled. These aren rsquo;t martial arts films. If there ever is any hand to hand fighting in them, it rsquo;s usually brutal street fighting.
There is sort of a martial arts approach to the the gunplay though with spectacular flips and dodges common during a shoot out. I haven rsquo;t heard it to be true but I always assumed that ldquo;gun kata rdquo; in the Christian Bale film Equilibrium. Honestly I rsquo;m not a big fan of these films because they sacrifice so much in character and story specifics in favor of operatic gun play.
But when the Nashville Film Festival started, this film was getting a lot of hype so I picked up a ticket and hoped for the best. There was some precedence for the film to be good because I had seen a few of the director rsquo;s earlier films that I liked. Johnny To directed the Heroic series starting with Heroic Trio.
If you haven rsquo;t seen this film, I highly recommend it.
In this film, a renegade member of the mob has run to Macau, China to try and start a new life with his wife and new baby. But his boss won rsquo;t let that happen because the renegade was apparently involved in some kind of assignation attempt.
This is the first example of a situation where the story gets a bit vague in order to keep the movie going and hurry into the action. We assume this is why the boss wants the renegade dead from context and imagery not from specific dialogue. In the end it really doesn rsquo;t matter though.
It rsquo;s kind of like those simple old martial arts films where a group of the best students from a dojo are sent out to avenge their master rsquo;s death or avenge and attack on the dojo. We never know why the initial attack happened but we do know there rsquo;s some revenge to be extracted and it should look real cool. It rsquo;s probably better that way because in those old martial arts flicks when we did get the back-story, it was frequently disappointing.
So, a couple of hit men show up on the man rsquo;s doorstep to kill the renegade, a few minutes later a couple of others, guys that he grew up with, show up to protect him. All of the men get tired of being dissuaded by the renegades rsquo; wife and finally push their way inside. From here a surprising bit of humor occurs.
The hitmen want to discuss the situation but there rsquo;s no furniture in the house so they team up and set about buying furniture and even making a big dinner so they can sit around a table and talk about the situation.
The next day brings more story vagaries; nothing you can rsquo;t decipher from context it just seems like some of the writing is just missing. The renegade leaves with his fiends and they go to a man who can hire them out for hit man work.
It seems that the renegade will take one last high paying job, a job that may get him killed, but the money will set up his wife and baby. Again, this isn rsquo;t specifically discussed but that seems to be the gist of the situation.
Exiled, even with the plot vagaries, is a joy to watch.
The film is assembled with some fantastic emotional cues, built around pictures old and new, and the characters are developed with a level of humanity not always common to these types of films. They feel like old friends put in an impossible situation, they fight others and each other, and they find humor in the slower moments. The shoot outs are exquisite with a melodic choreography and their own emotional cues.
The film features the expected twists and turns and tragedies all associated with the Hong Kong action formula but it rsquo;s all executed so well in this film that it feels fresh and new. The Magnolia Pictures logo preceded Exiled in the festival screening so I assume that Magnolia has already acquired it. So you should be able to see the film in a small art house theater or on DVD soon enough and it comes highly recommended.
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