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The titles roll over sacramental scrolls (with dashes of animation), after which the revenge storyline is nimbly set up. The wedding of a nobleman (Kong Lau) is crashed by a battalion of ninjas, whose master (Hoi San Lee) has come to claim the fortress as his own; Lau desires vengeance, but his master refuses him a sword until his thoughts are pure, so two warriors are engaged for the mission, a brave fellow with a dying mother (Pai Wei) and a scalawag who gulps wine while hanging upside down from a tree (Damian Lau). The kung-fu duels range from mano-a-mano to opulent demolition jobs, all catnip to John Woo, who shows his technique is up to his budding style -- fierce, swift zooms punctuate a skirmish with Hark-On Fung, who slices anybody who dares touch his sword, and the final showdown uses a rapidly descending crane for a charging POV, categorized correctly by one of the fighters as "a hell of a move." The villain practices deadly moves on his armored minions under heavy rain, and the storming of his fortress has room for a comic interlude with a snoozing dervish dubbed the "Sleeping Buddha," yet the acrobatics are unexpectedly undercut by a melancholy that ventures beyond the multiple betrayals and into the encroaching eclipse of the genre. Money trumps honor, the amount paid for redemption is doubled for treachery, "Your ways are different from your father's," the aged sword master grumbles to the fraudulent hero -- the English title is an exotic mistranslation, though it sets up its elegy for old-school wuxia. The triangular structure rehearses A Better Tomorrow, the gore-splattered face of Hard Boiled is anticipated, a courtesan chastely plucks the theme song, lyrical slo-mo is reserved for the guys: Woo instills Chang Cheh's tutelage with his own obsessions, and ushers action cinema into the new decade. With Chau Wa Ngai, and Kuo Sheng.
--- Fernando F. Croce |