Vingança

Oh my - When Billy The Kid met Memento met Tokyo Eyes met The Limey on steroids… The only film ever in which I enjoyed watching Johnny Hallyday. Anthony Wong is just bloody amazing, as in everything I saw with him - not much I concede, according to his length impressing filmography on IMDb.

I discovered Johnny To a few years back when The Mission came out, and since then, I am trying to watch anything he did. I skipped this one when it came out, being frightened by the infamous French/Belgian 60's idol presence - I just can't stand him as a public person. I was so wrong. Even though the first Hallyday's dialogue are just plain dreadful (the hospital scene at the beginning), Johnny To managed to take control and silence him. And the miracle works out.

When you forget even about the meaning of the word, what does vengeance means ?

"Vengeance" ("Fuk Sau") turned out to be quite nice. This is another great Johnnie To movie, and he is definitely in his right element with this movie.

The movie is driven by a fairly good storyline, but also by the drama and action sequences, but ultimately it is the powerhouse performances by the actors in the movie that carry the movie most of the way. And here I must especially point out Anthony Wong Chau-Sang (playing Kwai), Ka Tung Lam (playing Chu), Suet Lam (playing Fat Lok) and Simon Yam (playing George Fung). I didn't care one bit for the performance put on by Johnny Hallyday (playing Costello), and I think the movie would have been just that much better had they cast someone else for that role.

The storyline in "Vengeance" is about Costello who hires Kwai, Chu and Fat Lok to get revenge on those who killed his daughter, her husband and their children. It is a race to track down the culprits ranging from Macau to Hong Kong.

Aside from my own personal dislike against the lead actor in the movie, then "Vengeance" is a definite watch movie, especially if you enjoy Hong Kong cinema.

A decade ago, director Johnny To made an impression on many when he released "The Mission". Several years later, he explored similar ideas in "Exiled". Now, in 2009, Johnny To releases another movie and like the former two, it is a story of stoic killers dealing with issues of duty, loyalty, friendship and revenge all wrapped up in violence and tragedy.

To's style is unmistakable and yet reminds you of many high profile directors. There is of course the resemblance to Asian cinema in the vein of Woo. To like many of his contemporaries likes to mix modern, stylish action scenes with the bleakness of Noir films. The fact he is a fan of Jean-Pierre Melville shows big time, especially in Vengeance. I would also say he puts his mark on films as much as Sergio Leone did decades ago.

If you've liked The Mission and Exiled, chances are you will enjoy Vengeance although it is the weakest of the three in execution. Many scenes are reminiscent of the other two (particularly Exiled) and it features many of the actors. I thought the blood splatter effects from gunshots in Exiled were bold and promising. Unfortunately, here they aren't as stylish and clash a bit with the action.

Johnny To likes to concentrate on style. The stories are primal, the characters are archetypes. The Mission had an extremely simple core story, allowing the scenes to flow one after the other. In Exile, the plot was more convoluted while being less interesting. Vengeance is a return to a simpler plot. Unfortunately, it relies on extraordinary coincidences making suspension of disbelief impossible. You just have to enjoy the ride.

A good film but not the director's best.

Vengeance is about a Frenchman who travels to Hong Kong and Macau to avenge the murder of his daughter's family. The Memento-like riff is that he is losing his memory and so needs to take photos of people to remind himself who they are. It takes a long time before the filmmakers find a way to use this idea creatively, and then they use it really badly. What's annoying is that the movie doesn't need the memory loss lead at all, the whole movie still would work well if the guy was compos mentis, you still have a fish-out-of-water lead character, and you still have lots of material about loyalty and brotherhood.

Bloodthirsty vengeance is obviously a really bad idea, and so if you're going to make it the theme of a movie, you need either a strongly pulpy feel to the movie, or you need really stupid characters; maybe make it a samurai movie, as the sort of moral codes that existed centuries ago would make sense of the characters and their motivations here. As it is, this movie just doesn't make sense. Some of the narrative conceits are weak, like how the lead character comes across some assassins for hire randomly in his hotel. The movie also had really bad CGI, you could see the blood spurts each time someone got shot were amateurish.

I ended up being pretty annoyed, it just felt like someone had torn a first draft script from a scriptwriter's hands and just started shooting with it. Johnny Hallyday (rest in peace), is a picture of pain, but because he's been worn down by age and strife, not because he's acting it, there's nothing expressive about what he's doing in this movie. It comes across like he's involved so that the movie still got co-production money. According to Roger Ebert he was a last minute substitution for Alain Delon.

I won't deny that the movie has effective moments, the set piece at the barbecue spot at night is really good, although even that has a really stupid moment (improbable boomeranging Frisbee). I've recently watched Takashi Miike's Black Society Trilogy, and this effort from Johnnie To is absolutely light years behind those excellent movies in terms of quality. Somehow this was accepted in competition at Cannes in 2009.

As a Johnnie To fan, I have to say, that this is one of his weaker works. But it sill has a standard that some others may never reach (in my opinion that is of course). While there are themes of some of his other movies here too (loyalty etc.) and there are some nice character beats, as a whole there seems something lacking. But not only that, even small details have been done better.

One scene for example, where our main character puts a gun together has been done with much more style and class in the Korean movie "A bittersweet life". Also the ending of that scene feels rushed and somehow wrong. The main actors sometimes have to speak English (although it seems that some of them have been dubbed, they still learned phonetically, so it doesn't appear as dubbed) and you can tell, they are not feeling good doing this.

While our main character has a flaw, there are still quite a few things that shouldn't have happened quite like they do in the movie (pictures for example, and you will know what I mean, if you watch the movie). And while the flaw is a nice touch, it also almost works against the movie.

Again, a good movie in my book, but still quite a bit off ... what I came to expect from Mr. To!