tainan

I had a couple of hours to kill, and being a Keanu Reeves fan (especially for his dedication to the martial arts genre) I thought I'd check this out. First half hour was enjoyable. It felt like a 70s grind house action thriller.

Then came the video game carnage. Scene after scene of underworld minions getting shot in the face at point blank range. I'm sorry. I walked out at the hour mark. I realize I missed a cool car chase at the end - and that sucks. But I'm just tired of it. Tired, tired, tired. Tired of gun violence in movies, man. It's not just morally objectionable, it's just not exciting, it's just boring. So depressing to see Keanu involved in this kind of project. What really pisses me off too is when critics give lousy ratings to Tyler Perry movies which have nothing but positive messages and then lavish praise on this movie which is nothing but casual throw-away gun violence from beginning to end. Oh yes, but it's so stylish. Yeah right.

Between 1984 and 1991, after the demise of the traditional kung fu film, and before things really started going downhill with excessive wire-work, Hong Kong action movies moved through a kick-boxing phase which introduced more pragmatic fighting but retained some old-school sensibilities. Of all the films produced in these five/six years "Witness: ITLOD 4" is hands down the best. Here's my reasons why:

• the pacing is superb. You watch action films for action - and Yuan Ho-Ping,as is his wont, keeps the movie going at a breathless pace with a fight or chase almost every five minutes.

• Yuan Ho-Ping uses his strict rhythmic parameters so the action is clear and we can enjoy every movement. Some classical moves are dropped in just to make the action a little prettier. Long shots and close ups are used when appropriate and to give variety - all typical Yuan Ho-Ping trademarks and this is what sets him apart from inferior filmmakers in the genre. He also introduces some great novelty fighters - the female foreign fighter who looks like an English teacher with a heroin habit, the crazy eyed foreigner in the alley with the eccentric fighting style and of course Michael Woods.

• The syncronisation of the action and sound effects is SO crisp here and the sound effects have never sounded better - deep body blows and crisp "pak" sounds - music to my ears!

• The soundtrack music is superb! A little bit like the repeated theme of "Halloween" - it's icy and sinister - a delicious backdrop for the brutal and surgically precise action. There's a way that the theme anticipates the action in the way that a repeated theme introduces particularly nasty sequences in a Lucio Fulci film.

• Silence accompanying action. I love the way that characters roll over, across in and out of cars and buildings in silence. It may not have been a deliberate device - but the fact that HK films are shot silent and then dubbed later sometimes results in some very interesting dynamics.

• You enter into a world of claustrophobic and relentless brutality - which slips in and out of a cartoon universe where people take beatings with tire-irons and walk away intact one minute, and end up bleeding and lifeless in lift shafts in another. Yet in this icy universe of remorseless violence there are moments of compassion - for example when the "witness" is allowed to visit his mother - but this touching scene is, once again, abruptly terminated and violence resumes.

On top of the best action you will ever see, there are also the qualities to the film I have listed above. This all results in a quite extraordinary film with a very distinctive feel and ambiance. It's strange - I've never experienced the same kind of quality with any other Hong Kong film. When I first showed this to friends they demanded repeat viewings - it's like a roller-coaster ride that leaves you craving yet another adrenalin rush.

Contains spoiler!

These days if even five minutes of a movie excite me then I feel it was worth the price of admission. The first ten minutes of "28 weeks later" are so emotionally wrenching and inventively exciting that I could have left the cinema a happy man there and then. The grinding darkness and the kinetic rawness reminded me a lot of Lucio Fulci's classic zombie movies. There is such a crushing bleakness about this scene that is becomes a cinematic recreation of the kind of horrible dream from which you wake with a heart wrenching sense of hopelessness - which is in many ways worse that a waking crisis because when you are conscious there is always a glimmer of hope. But not in the dark realms of sleep.

And so this emotionally draining first scene plays out as if directly streaming from our worst nightmare - and that sense of claustrophobic doom is beautifully compounded by a repeated musical theme that gets louder and more insistent as distorted guitar is added and the volume becomes almost unbearable. The re-introduction of this musical theme at moments of peak horror late in the movie is also reminiscent of Fulci movies - particularly as the theme is a full of desperate melancholy which amplifies beautifully the tragic situation that Robert Carlyle finds himself trapped in - forced to abandon his wife to the flesh eating hordes. The camera then follows him across the English countryside as he runs for his life. What a poignant image - the pastoral beauty of the English fields and the dark shadows of the undead. And then we have the sublime editing during the boat sequence as Carslisle fights off the zombies, with the boat spinning round and the music pounding to a head splitting climax. I was left breathless and dizzy.

It was like Zombie Flesh Eaters all over again for the first time. Nothing later in the movie came close to this. I had ten minutes of heaven - worth the price of admission - and if I can take away just ten minutes of revitalizing, vibrant, inspired cinema that's more than I expect from most multiplex movies these days.