Crappy film

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

I did not know what to expect from Exiled when I have watched it for the first time in 2006 and it blew me away. After watching Johnnie To documentary - Johnnie Got His Gun, I have felt the need to watch it again.As many reviews said before this one is Johnnie To's modern day western. Over the top violence (a door that keeps flying in the air by shooting, spurting blood) at a setting with no police around at all is the order of the day.Nothing bad can be said about the cast of this movie. All the great guys from 1999's The Mission is here. Add Simon Yam to the mix and that is as good as it gets. Female character could be more beautiful but that's life.The great cast from The Mission returns in this one.The story is simple but character development is somewhat shallow. With 15 more minutes of character development of good guys and the bad guys and this would be a classic.As far as the shooting goes this is as good as it gets. Johnnie To is really master of its craft when it comes to movies with guns, lots of guns. The final shootout at the hotel is one of the best ever, competing with John Woo's Hard-Boiled which I think is the best movie ever.If you love action movies with lots of guns blazing this is the movie for you.

and ... it was very very good overall nice tensions building up everywhich way, nice performances, gunfights that were more or less cyphers - it was completely unclear what was happening in em until the dust settled and you saw finally who'd survived the big brouhahas and who hadn't done.I liked it very much for its timing and phrasing however illogical a lot of it was it was very effective and the audience was beautifully manipulated through the various stages in the progress of the narrative.I have to say the big bad guy was awfully forgiving for someone who had his testicalia blown off, of course it wasn't really so, he was a backstabbing type and even if all hell had not broken loose he would certainly have wreaked havoc over his new boy soprano spot in the choir!

Mainstream Asian cinema owes as much to Hollywood as mainstream cinema anywhere in the world. Hollywood perfected cinematic storytelling in the 30's and 40's and its influence is still present in practically everything we watch. The transition from Hong Kong to Hollywood has elevated (or destroyed, depending who you ask) the careers of many directors and actors: Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, John Woo and Tsui Hark to name a few. To his credit, one director has avoided the calling of the West and remained in Hong Kong not only to buoy HK cinema, but also to redefine himself as perhaps the most interesting of all mainstream Asian filmmakers.Johnny To may be the only HK filmmaker who possibly owes as much to Jean-Luc Godard as he does to Hollywood. As such, the similarities between To's films and Tarantino's are impossible to disregard and, like Tarantino, To elevates the tired clichés and conventions of genre pics (the same traits John Woo is (sac)religiously married to) into revisionist works of art. But To's influences don't begin and end with Godard and Exiled hammers this home since it is crammed full of references to Leone's famous Spaghetti Westerns and also to the classic John Ford Westerns that made John Wayne a household name. Make no mistake about it, Exiled is a Western and even though it masquerades as a HK triad shoot em' up, every single detail on the screen is cherry picked from Westerns.Exiled is a good example of how a film can, at first, smack of familiarity before taking off on a fresh, uncharted flight of fiction. Despite a few clunky sequences and some thin writing, Exiled will not only be hailed by To fans as one of his best films, it will also find converts thanks to its Triad trimmings (and those in search of a post-modern Western).In Exiled, the premise of a typical gangland hit evolves into a blossoming character study of five friends whose pasts unfold in increments alongside the growing chaos of present circumstances. While gun play cracks throughout, To's style is nothing like Woo's, where, instead of making the action the proud centerpiece, To uses it sparingly as an infrequent catalyst to propel our protagonists story arc from one escalating situation to the next. That's not to say the action isn't palpable, but the action is merely a flash of style that's deliberately trumped by the predominant substance throughout. Exiled makes a strong case that if John Woo were to permanently abandon the West for his homeland, he'd have some catching up to do with the current king of Kong.http://eattheblinds.blogspot.com/

Unrealistic, plodding, stupid and unsatisfying is what springs to mind to describe this gangster flick. I found the editing to be very clunky with way too much dead time that continually wiped out any momentum this movie could get going.The scene near the end with the river and the field on the opposite shore was comical it was so bad and so pathetically unrealistic.An important thing in an action film is suspension of disbelief- this never occurs in this dumb movie- it's always you sitting there going jeez- like that could ever happen that's lame.This movie is not slick, it is not high action, it is high body count but the violence is stupid, cartoonish and very boring.I could not make it through this stupid wretch and wound up fast forwarding in the hopes it might have a good scene- but none were to be found.Blow the dust off of HARD BOILED and watch that instead.