Saturday, September 4, 2010

View The Adventure Film Exiled Soon

By Lakeisha Dodson

If you're looking for an action flick that's a little different from the usual shaky cam and incoherent running and shooting, Exiled may be the answer. It belongs on any movie downloads queue for the way that it manages to create a strange, dreamlike trance in its action through slow motion and unpredictable developments.

We follow a gangster who betrayed his boss years ago, and his since gotten married and had a baby. The boss sends a couple of hitmen to take him out, while at the same time, two other former members of the gang show up to protect him. This is where the movie begins.

The five characters are all friends, and so, after a quick, and dazzling shootout, they come to a compromise. Where most gangster movies are fairly cold and impersonal when it comes to "whacking" people, this one is oddly sweet and sentimental, and the five decide to pull off a big score to support the wife and child of the lead character before settling any other business they might have together.

The movie was directed by Johnnie To, the Hong Kong legend, who came out with his first films around the same time as John Woo and Ringo Lam were defining the Heroic Bloodshed genre of HK action flicks. Where those earlier films were defined by the anger at the Chinese takeover of the city, this one has a sense of forgiveness, compassion and understanding, having been made after the takeover.

The movie has an odd, dreamlike quality to it. An opening gunfight has a bathroom door fly off its hinges and it twirls gracefully around the room until the firefight finally ends. Later we see a character throw a Red Bull can into the air, and the entire gunfight happens in slow motion before the can hits the ground. This is a bullet ballet.

The story isn't always quite as clear as the action, but this actually helps to improve the dreamlike quality of the film. To himself has admitted that he finds the film confusing and still hasn't quite made sense of it. Watch it for the characters and the action, though, and you'll be able to appreciate the movie in full.

The Heroic Bloodshed era of Hong Kong action flicks was certainly an incredible time for film lovers. Hard Boiled and City on Fire defined the genre, being angry, explosive films, showing independent characters taking on the masses as a symbol of Hong Kong independence against Chinese communism. Lam and Woo went to Hollywood, and you could argue the qualities of their American films. Johnnie To stayed behind and turned the genre into something entirely different.

It's truly a rare spectacle in the world of action. Even if you've seen everything John Woo and Ringo Lam have ever made, this movie will show you something you haven't seen before. It's definitely something to watch if you're looking for an action scene with its own approach to the usual shootouts and fight scenes.

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