Saturday, September 4, 2010

The Movie Hit Exiled: A Fair Review

By Lakeisha Dodson

If you love action flicks, but you're getting tired of all this whiz bang, shaky camera stuff where you can't tell what the heck is going on, Exiled may be the antidote you're looking for. This makes any worthwhile action movie downloads list because the action isn't so darned all over the place. Everything is clear and coherent, you can tell what's going on. You rarely see action this... Graceful.

Years after a top ranked lieutenant in the Triad betrays his boss, the boss, played by Simon Yam, sends a pair of hitmen to take him out. Meanwhile, two members of the gang come to protect the man. These characters were all friends in the gang, and it's out of duty that the two hitmen come to kill their old partner. They come to a compromise and decide to pull off a big score to support the man's wife and child before settling their conflict.

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.

This movie comes from Johnnie To, the legendary Hong Kong director who came up around the same time as John Woo and Ringo Lam, in the Heroic Bloodshed era. Where those movies were driven by anger at the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong, Exiled was made after the takeover, when it was shown that things hadn't changed quite as much as the Hong Kong people were expecting.

The film really feels like a dream, with slow motion shootouts taking several minutes while only carrying about thirty seconds of action were they to be shot in real time. One incredible sequence has a character throwing an empty drink can into the air, and the shootout takes place over several minutes as the can falls to the floor in slow motion just seconds after the final bullet is fired.

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 genre of Heroic Bloodshed was defined by angry violence, often showing one man up against an army as a parallel to the independent people of Hong Kong and their anger against the Communist China. After Woo and Lam went to Hollywood, Johnnie To stayed behind and redefined the genre on his own terms, turning it into something a little less vitriolic.

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. - 40730

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