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TThe theme of the 1990 John Woo extravaganza can lead the uninitiated to wait chillingly to look, the target to kill. In fact, there are countless bullets and countless heads in the classic gonzo game. It is a crime thriller, a wartime film set Vietnambut it offers something different from Hollywood’s perspective; it’s a metaphor for greed similar to Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and even a genre of love songs.
There is, however, one important bullet in the head, the actual bullet placed in the skull of the person who achieves the survival of the macabre zombie as a semi-survival, the bullet represents how violence starts in the brain, destroying the victim. The final “boardroom” scene that unfolds is the most insane and strange. However, in this film, like many of Woo’s other films, we can see how the director uses sad music – harmonica, woodwind – in brutal, cruel situations, as if what he wants us to register is not violence or shock but how it is empty and sad.
The setting is – originally – late 60s Hong Kong; Tony Leung plays Ben, a young man getting married to his love Jane (Fennie Yuen), and is close to his friends Frank (Jacky Cheung) and Paul (Waise Lee). The three are involved in a gang war with a rival gang who stop Frank after he goes to get money from a moneylender to pay for the wedding. The conflict ends in violence and, just to escape and avoid the heat – Woo is accompanied by a police detective – the three young men receive a bad job from a criminal boss who smuggles drugs in Vietnam.
In Saigon, all their thoughts explode in pure chaos; At first they are arrested on suspicion of working for the Vietcong, then they develop their means to smuggle weapons to the North Vietnamese, and steal the gold of a local intelligence man who is supposed to distribute their drugs. They connect with a world organizer named Luke (Simon Yam), who has a painting of Catherine Deneuve in his house, and they also try to save Hong Kong singer Sally (Yolinda Yam), who was sold in Vietnam for sex. They end up at a spectacular war site (with helicopters, explosions, burning villages), where Paul, obsessed with gold, finds himself at a critical moment in danger of death if he cannot keep quiet the wounded Frank, whose cries of pain can make the enemy know their location.
It’s a wonderful, uninhibited, no-holds-barred performance from Woo, who takes us from routine, domestic violence to the chaos of war with boldness and sweep. One moment, where someone is standing in front of a tank, seems to resemble the Tiananmen Square protests. No one else could have done it.
