Cynical Cinema

When I started watching Exiled, the latest Chinese action film from director Johnnie To (who is very good), for the first time in a long time I found myself wishing desperately that I spoke Cantonese. I figured that if I spoke Cantonese, I would have some idea what the hell was going on. For the first forty-five minutes of the film, I was basically lost as to the plot. And what was most irritating was that even if I spoke Cantonese, I would still likely not have understood. There was so little dialogue, and so much sweeping camera work that the story is moved along almost exclusively in pictures. Which were impressive. The camera work here is terrific, and in some cases, breathtaking. But that does not tell the story. The movie opens with four guys following a fifth guy into his house, at which point they even up the odds and have a gun fight. When they see this fifth guy’s wife and baby, they stop their gunfight, repair the bullet holes in the house, and they all sit down to dinner. What? They go see another guy, then that guy sees another guy, who’s talking to the boss who keeps phoning one of the original four guys…it seems bonkers.

In fact, I learned more about the plot from reading the back of the box than I did from watching the film. I can only surmise that the blurb written on the back of the DVD case was written by the director himself, or at the very least someone who spoke Cantonese. Because I would be amazed if anyone sitting here in Canada or the U.S. could have figured it out. It turns out that two of the four guys were there to kill the fifth, and the other two were there to protect him. And in order to make sure that his wife and baby are provided for, the fifth man suggests that all five of them pull off one last big score before he is executed so his wife and baby will have something to live on. Again, I got this from the back of the case, and not from the movie itself.

My girlfriend gave up. After half an hour, she was totally lost, and even the occasional brief gun fight could no longer pique her interest. My commitment was a little greater. I figured that if Alliance Atlantis was giving me the DVD to review, the least I could do would be to sit through it. And am I ever glad I did! From the forty-five minute mark on, the movie makes sense. And by the end of it, the whole thing makes sense, and you have forgotten that painful first forty minutes or so. The main reason is the five main actors, who are all terrific. I’m not going to attempt to write their names down here any more than I plan to try to pronounce them on the air, but all five are wonderful. They are so convincing as buddies and equally convincing as enemies. Equal part good guy and bad guy, the killers and thieves with a certain ambiguous morality…I think I have written something a lot like this recently. Sound familiar?

Well, the Chinese certainly love their American westerns, and Exiled is no exception. The main characters are very reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch, there is a scene where a gun keeps being shot away from a soldier that is taken directly from a scene between Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef (with a hat, not a gun) in For a Few Dollars More. And the final scene is straight out of the Wild Bunch as well. Oops. For those of you who have SEEN The Wild Bunch, that may have given away the ending somewhat. Sorry. The main problem with Exiled is that the second half is far superior to the first, yet the second half would not work at all without the beginning. So you can’t just skip to 44:15 and start watching. I give the first half four out of ten, the second half eight out of ten, which overall gives the movie six out of ten. Makes sense, right? Exiled comes out on Tuesday, January 15th.

China is a country of what - more than a billion people, right? So it would stand to reason that two or three million of them would be actors, I think. And yet the DVDs that are sent to Canada from China and Hong Kong seem to always star the same fourteen actors. Why? Well, because those are the elite, I assume. The super-elite (Chow Yun-Fat, Jet Li, Gong Li, Zhang Ziyi) cross over to Hollywood. The regular elite stay in Asia. The Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts and Russell Crowe and George Clooney and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of Asian cinema. PTU: Police Tactical Unit is another one of these films, and it stars the usual suspects - Simon Yam (Election, Dragon Heat, Kill Zone, Exiled and hundreds of other movies), Lam Suet (Dog Bite Dog, Exiled, Election and hundreds of others), Maggie Shiu (Election…and so forth), as well as Ruby Wong, Eddie Ko, Lo Hoi-Pang and Raymond Wong.

The basic premise is that in Hong Kong, there is an elite police unit, the PTU. (This is true in real life as well, this unit does exist.) They are trying to help out a beat cop who has been mugged and lost his gun. I think we are to assume that a cop who loses his gun in China gets fired. Or executed. Or something. Because this is a pretty big deal, and this cop (Suet) goes to extreme lengths to keep his superiors from finding out that he lost the weapon. There are some triad gangs involved, as there always are with Hong Kong cop movies. The movie is directed by Johnnie To, one of the best directors in Asian cinema today, with movies like Exiled and Election under his belt. PTU was a highly personal movie for him, one he directed over three years, while he churned out seemingly dozens of other movies to fulfill his contract with his Chinese studio. It was released in China in 2003, and comes out on DVD here in Canada today, courtesy of Alliance Films.

There are better options. Exiled, Election, Fulltime Killer are all better movies than this one. The main reason is that it is difficult to watch PTU without thinking of China and their human rights record, which is kinda in the news right now. This PTU apparently exists outside the bounds of police procedure, Miranda rights, and human decency. They walk around, (often in slow-motion in a group, a la Reservoir Dogs), beating suspects to the point where they might actually die, inflicting torture on gang members who have nothing to offer by way of information, and generally abusing everyone that crosses their path. Simon Yam is the leader of this elite group, and co-ordinates all the abusive efforts in order to help a cop find his gun. The movie clearly believes that this sort of police brutality and destruction of human rights is OK, even that it is laudable and justified. But it’s tough to watch and agree.

We know that the gang members have no information to offer. We know that the torture will lead to nothing, and will not create new evidence or provide any clues. So why put it in the movie? To seems to believe that this over-zealous coppery is indicative of the brotherhood between these cops. I mean, they would never rat each other out even if they beat a suspect to death for no reason. So…kudos to them? Throughout the film, there is a hard-nosed, tough-chick Internal Affairs cop sniffing around, apparently not trying to nail the PTU on their methods, but rather to bust the fat cop for losing his gun. But in the end, after the ultra-violent shootout that always closes these movies, her behaviour is inexplicable unless we believe that the whole point of this movie is that police brutality is not just necessary, but a heroic endeavour in and of itself.

There are some cool scenes, and some great gunfights, but you can get that in hundreds of Asian movies, and several by To himself. (Fulltime Killer remains one of my all-time favourites.) Grab Exiled, get Election, but skip this one. It is sort of emblematic of what is wrong with the entire country of China.