johnnie to

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Drug War (2012)
Directed by Johnnie To
Starring: Louis Koo, Honglei Sun, and Huang Yi

Synopsis: A drug cartel boss who is arrested in a raid is coerced into betraying his former accomplices as part of an undercover operation.

Rating: 8/10

This is the type of film that will keep bringing me back to Johnnie To. The plot is convoluted and a little crazy, but also endlessly interesting with cops, informants, and bad guys switching allegiances and sides like a roulette table. The action is fierce, chaotic, and meticulously staged.

There is a scene late in the film where a cop handcuffs himself to a guy’s leg. Then the cop gets killed, so the bad guy has to run around dragging the cop’s corpse along with him. If that doesn’t make you want to watch this film, I don’t know what will.

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Breaking News (2004)
Directed by Johnnie To
Starring: Richie Jen, Kelly Chen, and Nick Cheung
Synopsis: After a disastrous failure to stop a robber gang, the police attempt to redeem themselves through a series of publicity stunts and shootouts.
Rating: 7/10

I’m quite behind on these. They are easy to write and I always mean to write them right after I watch, but then something comes up and I forget. I watched this one five days ago. I’ll try to play catch-up this weekend.

Johnnie is a Hong Kong director whose name gets tossed around quite a bit in my circles, but I’d never seen one of his films until now. The Criterion Channel is running a whole bunch of them, and I chose this one pretty much at random. It was good enough to make me watch another one the very next day and then a third a couple of days later.

It begins with an incredible 7-minute-long one-take shot. It follows a man into a building (the camera cranes to a top floor and into a building, then back out again), followed by a shootout with the cops. This goes poorly for the cops, and they decide they need to put on a “show” for the media. Basically, they start using their own PR department to create videos to send to the news to indicate how awesome they are.

The action scenes (and there are quite a lot of them) are all staged really well. The media stuff feels very dated and has not aged particularly well. But as I said, there is enough to love here that I immediately watched another film from To.