Manhunt

I'm not a 100% sure John Woo fully directed this mess. Everyone was hoping for a return of the action master, instead we get a slow, boring and ridiculous movie that is all over the place. It takes plots lines from The Fugitive, Hard Target, and Max Payne! He'd been planing a wave runner chase since Hard Target, we finally get it, and it's a dud. Looks like a movie that was filmed for the Hallmark channel.

5/27/18. Plenty of action, but I have read that this movie had to be re-cut for the China audience. If you enjoy lots of action that could be somewhat plotless at times, then this one's for you.

What stood out for me in this film was the excellent cinematography by Takuro Ishizaka, and the main reason I scored this film as high as I did.

Next plus was the good choreography for the action scenes, especially the last 20 mins of the film.

The story itself (although we've seen it before) wasn't bad, but wasn't written well into a screenplay. Although the pace wasn't slow, the 106 min length felt longer with the long dragged out scenes and cheesy prolonged slow-mo parts. This film needed to be edited down to a max 80 mins.

Most of the subtitles didn't make any sense, but I'm guessing some 3rd party translator messed those up, so I wont consider that in my rating, but it did make the sub-par acting from most of the cast look very amateurish, as I didn't get to fully immerse myself in each character.

Then there's John Woo's directing, which at times felt like it was his early amateur work, and at other times felt like some grade 8 drama student put it together. He failed to direct his actors properly, as some performed certain scenes so badly, the director should have called a re-shoot. Clearly not his best work in the directing, writing and editing departments.

Throughout the entire film, I had already decided to give this film a 4 or 5/10, but the last 20 mins of fast paced action, plot twists and good choreography redeemed the score to a slightly better 6/10. Had the writing been tighter with less 'cheese', it could have been a 7 or 8/10

There was fair reason to be excited for "Manhunt". It was John Woo's return to the modern crime action film, his signature style, after more than a decade away from it. On top of that, it was his first film of this style made in Asia since 1992's "Hard Boiled," in many ways the apex of his powers. However, while "Manhunt" checks a lot of boxes on what one would want from a classic John Woo shoot 'em up; a story of a cop and criminal and their relationship with one another, slow motion gunfights, doves, et cetera, in can't help but feel like its only artificially copying the key tropes of Woo's classic films without having the soul embodying it that made his other films action classics.

While no one goes into a Woo film expecting a smart, nuanced story, it is fair to expect that its stupidity is at least kept in check. In his best films, "The Killer," "A Better Tomorrow," and, "Hard Boiled," he briefly indulges in moments of excess and melodrama that are reined in by well written characters and stories that deal with universal themes, such as the conflict between faith and the needs of reality, or the issues with loving one's family in spite of their sometimes heinous actions. Then there are Woo films that use melodrama and stupidity to their advantage, such as, "Face/Off," that are aware of their own ridiculousness and ham it up for maximum effect, aware that it is all they are good for. But "Manhunt" occupies an awkward place that fits successfully into neither area. It's a film with no brain on its shoulders that still seems to take itself too seriously. It's a deadly combination that bring down the film more than anything, although there are still some elements of classic Woo that make it in.

One farmhouse gunfight sequence in the middle of the film is as close as anything Woo has done since "Hard Boiled" to capturing his classic style, with expertly choreographed fighting, excellent use of editing and slow-motion, and inventive use of the space and setting briefly create a classic John Woo bullet-ballet of yore. However, the rest of the action in the film doesn't hold up quite as well. The film's opening scene sets expectations high with its slick, tight camera movement, but unfortunately the rest of the film is plagued with overly tight, shaky camera work that makes the action hard to appreciate. It's a shame, since it was Woo's slick, clean quality to his action that always made him stand above other directors making similar work.

The film also isn't helped by Woo's apparent sudden obsession with digital filmmaking technology. There is nary a shot nor cut in the film that isn't altered by some effect, whether simple cuts are created into crossfades for seemingly no reason, shots are sped up and slowed down at random, creating a jagged, jittery mess, and different coloured filters and visual distortions warping our perception. It appears as if Woo went through every single setting in After Effects just to try everything out, and it is almost never necessary for telling the story efficiently, and often works against it. The story itself is a predictable conspiracy thriller about a pharmaceutical corporation using its products for brainwashing purposes crossed with a classic mistaken identity thriller, but the film's constant need to cut away to other scenes and flashbacks and awkwardly transition in and out of scenes with no sense of pacing or rhythm means that the plot becomes overly complicated when it really never needs to be.

Hanyu Zhang and Stephy Qi both hold their own with fairly naturalistic performances that compliment the more gritty aspects of the story, but Masaharu Fukuyama plays Detective Yamura like a cartoon character, leading for an awkward tension between the scenes he shares with Zhang where their styles never quite match up. It doesn't help either that the film floats between being spoken in Cantonese, Japanese, and English, with none of the actors seeming to have a firm grasp of all of them, leading to some poorly fitting and unconvincing ADR all throughout the film that looks like a bad Kung-Fu dub, except they are being dubbed with the same language they are speaking.

All in all, "Manhunt" really just highlights the sad reality that maybe John Woo doesn't have that special ability that he used to have that made his classic films the classics they are. My only hope is from this experience he can realize that and start focusing on trying to make something new and challenging him that will better suit where he is at now in his career instead of trying and failing to recapture his glory days.

5/10 You probably know Director John Woo from the Cage/Travolta crazy classic Face/Off.

But I know him from his trilogy of awesome Hong Kong movies The Killer, Hardboiled and Bullet To The Head.

I was hoping that this was a return to form. Sadly it's not. Weak action, bizarre story all over the place and dreadful editing.