Vengeance (Fuk sau)

AVENGE ME, BOYS, AVENGE ME!!!!
dir: Johnnie To
I have to admit, I find this flick pretty… strange. Much as I love Johnnie To’s flicks, and as much as I consider him one of the last Hong Kong directors making movies of any worth, style or significance, that doesn’t always mean I get where he’s coming from.
See, it’s a Hong Kong flick that mostly transpires in Macau, with an aged French actor as the lead, who doesn’t speak Cantonese, who wants revenge. Revenge! Or vengeance, as the case may be, on those who brutally attacked his daughter and murdered his grand children.
Why Costello (Johnny Halliday) wants revenge is almost irrelevant, because the sad fact is as well that, mixing in an element from Memento, Costello has short term memory problems, making his stated intention to seek Vengeance that much harder.
He accidentally stumbles across a team of hitmen, who he enlists in his righteous cause. They haltingly speak English, and he haltingly understands it, but they bond with each other, for reasons not obvious to me.
To’s films always, always, almost always centre around the idea of the brotherhood of man, and the bonds between men that can spring up through mutual criminality or happenstance, and yet prove stronger than love or death. To’s comfort with using the same stable of actors, or the union/triad gangster requirement to use the same actors in every single Hong Kong flick mean there’s a certain degree of shorthand involved.
- Read more about Vengeance (Fuk sau)
- 4220 reads