Cynical Cinema

A movie I’ve had sitting around on DVD for a long, long time.  It’s been in my collection, and I haven’t had the time until today.  Also, after a little while, I had forgotten about it almost entirely.  Then I started watching more and more of the Dragon Dynasty DVDs that are being shipped into Canada, and they all had trailers for this Dog Bite Dog business.  And the trailers made it look amazing.  So I finally got around to it today, having been completely sold by the trailers.  I do love a good, action-packed kung fu movie.

But this is not a good, action-packed kung fu movie.  There is a lot of action, but not enough that I would call it “packed”.  There is a lot of fighting, but none of it is kung-fu.  Or martial arts of any kind, for that matter.  And Dog Bite Dog has that martial-arts movie standard plot element, the underground illegal fighting operation that pits man against man as gamblers toss money around.  But this time, it isn’t kung-fu fighters vs. MMA fighters.  It’s simply a battle of craziest-maniac-wins.  That is what makes the characters in this movie compelling.  They are not martial arts experts or unstoppable hit-man killing machines.  They are simply determined not to lose, and not to stop going until the other guy is dead.  Which makes for intense fighting sequences, far more intense and real than you could ever see in a balletic kung-fu epic.

A hit-man opens the movie by killing a woman in an especially detached and brutal fashion in a restaurant, right in front of her elderly husband.  He then gets into a standoff with the police, where he kills a cop.  Then he escapes from custody, kills more cops, and then kills a guy in a shed so he can use his phone.  As it happens, this guy in the shed is not really a nice guy.  In fact, he is a rather heinous individual, who has been keeping his own daughter prisoner in this shed at the dump for years.  The daughter, indebted to the hitman, yet damaged in her brain beyond all repair, forms a bond.  We find out quickly that this hitman is also damaged beyound repair.  And through the whole movie, he isn’t so much the prototypical steel-eyed assassin from these movies, but rather a child in a man’s body who just happens not to care who he kills.

 The shambling, childlike assassin and the cops out for vengeance are of course on a collision course, and by the end of the movie, you really don’t know who to root for.  You’re not supposed to.  The cops are as bad as the hitman, the assassin is as good as the cops, they all have something to fight and to die for, but someone has to lose.  The final confrontation is as intense as it is fast.  It’s over before you know it, which is amazing for this kind of movie.  Oh wait.  There’s more.  I thought this film was taking forever to end, with one of those music-montage fadeouts into the end credits.  But really, it was a music-montage fadeout into the REAL ending of the movie.  Which is even more gritty and intense than the rest of the movie leading up to it!

Throughout the whole movie, however, one thing really bothered me.  Internal Affairs cops kept showing up and investigating the cop, and his hero-cop father, for what seemed like no reason at all.  I mean, they had a reason, but why throw it into the movie?  I think it’s just a given in Asian cop movies - the IAD has to be in there, and they have to be weasels and we have to hate them.  Perhaps it’s written into the contracts.  These directors are like the Don Cherry of movies - put the whistle away!  Just let ‘em go!  Let cops be cops and boys be boys…anyway, Dog Bite Dog is one of the best Asian action movies to come along in a while.  I’m sorry I missed it up until now, but I’m sure glad I finally got around to it.  Gritty, grimy, dirty, and incredibly intense, you’ll find yourself, right at the end, letting out the breath you didn’t even realize you were holding the whole time.  Dog Bite Dog is a must.