Exiled

Finally saw it. Wow. My mind's still reeling in awe of it that I don’t know how to start.

Four men came knocking at a house looking for one man. Two came to kill him, the other two to protect him. The wanted man finally shows up and the gunplay and the violence begins.

Exiled is basically a western but instead of a frontier town the action is transposed to 1998 pre-handover Macau. And while director Johnnie To riffs from the masters of the western genre--traces of Sergio Leone in the first fifteen minutes (and throughout the film, actually) and there are tones of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch towards the end--the film is all To. And as with all Johnnie To crime flicks, the action set pieces are things to behold. The aforementioned opening fifteen minutes is fun, but it’s just a taste of what is to come. Personal fave though is the shootout at the underground clinic; close quarters gunfight in a claustrophobic setting and To stages the hell out of it. Jaw-dropper, really. Heck, I found myself slack-jawed even in some non-action scenes.

The cast consists of To mainstays: Anthony Wong, Francis Ng, Lam Suet, Roy Cheung, and Simon Yam. It’s the classic cast of The Mission plus a couple of new faces in Nick Cheung and Richie Jen. Unsurprisingly, the leads do very well. Even Nick Cheung was bearable for I thought he was a bit annoying in Breaking News.

Yeah, the themes and situations are nothing new to To (he even gives some nods to his classic The Mission, which Exiled may or may not be a sequel to, but who cares, right?) but with this one, there’s a certain… exuberance to it. It’s like Johnnie To’s having fun on this one and it is infectious.

Not that the film is light. I think that parts of it are grimmer than The Mission. It turns somber towards the end but in a self-reflexive moment, the characters laugh despite their fate. They had a good run and they had fun and surely the audience did too.