For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

This movie is absolutely straight-up bonkers, nuts, crazy, insane. To say "the cinematographer's fueled by a combination of drugs" is an understatement. Seeing a few of Wong Kar-Wai's other features I really had high hopes for this one, however at the end I found it disappointing as it doesn't capture the same charisma or structure of his other films, for example like As Tears Go By or Chungking Express. The biggest problem in my opinion is Michelle Reis' character as the set-up girl. She isn't given enough screen time to establish a decent bond with the audience, the charm surrounding her is flat. Karen Mok's character of Blondie is unfortunately average, she comes across as annoying rather than afflicted and thus fails to capture the audience's interest too. The women in this movie just don't tote the same amount of power as in other Kar-Wai films. The females are cold and don't intend to change, which goes against the male characters and flow of the movie. Again the cinematography feels overzealous and at some moments, even pretentious which I never thought I could say about Kar-Wai. Complaints aside, Takeshi Kaneshiro steals the show with his bizarre character, and I would actually watch the movie again just to see his portion. There's a lot of great themes here, and the sense of grittiness and isolation is done extremely well. Overall I didn't enjoy Fallen Angels, but I do understand the attraction. Other Wong Kar-Wai fans may love it. -6/10

Fallen Angels: like the companion movie (Chungking Express), it's a pure cinematographic gem born unexpectedly. Wong Kar-Wai and Chris Doyle were working on Ashes of Time, and the project was exhausting. They decided suddenly to put Ashes of Time on hold and to produce quickly something light, unpretentious, just to warm their spirits. There was no script, just a loose idea: some slices of life in today's Hong Kong, kind of romantic comedies with young heroes hanging around Chungking Mansions and Midnight Express. Two vignettes were made this way, with young cops falling in love, drug dealers wearing sun glasses and blond wigs, barmaids becoming flight attendants and flight attendants returning from San Francisco: this was Chungking Express, released in 1994.As the third vignette was unfolding, it became clear for the director that the mood of the story was different, and it deserved a separate movie: that was Fallen Angels, released in 1995. Two completely distinct plots evolving in parallel, and intertwining only in brief moments and only by hazard. A young hit-man getting his assignments through a fax machine and a sympathetic and totally immature mute (played with irresistible charm by Takeshi Kaneshiro, who was also an irresistible cop-in-love in Chungking Express).Well, a mute cannot talk, everybody knows it, but what happens in Fallen Angels is that actually nobody seems able to communicate through human speech. The agent (Michelle Reis - I saw her also in Flowers of Shanghai) who gives the assignments to the hit-man (and even visits his narrow apartment when he is out) is a gorgeous girl, unconditionally in love for his subordinate. However she never meets him and prefers to masturbate instead. It is a terrifying impression of loneliness in a frenetic city, everybody is alone there, on her or his own, deepened in her or his own thoughts and dreams, and everybody's dreams seem crazy while only dreams keep you there to not get crazy.I remember the cabs in a region I used to live for many years: the driver had a small computer on board and all communication with the dispatcher was through the screen, no room for bargaining of any kind, no space for any human feeling, of joy or sorrow, of sympathy or sarcasm. Here in Fallen Angels it's the fax machine, the same sensation of alienation, of loss of humanity. Humans transformed in robots, keeping their human condition for themselves only, through masturbating dreams of impossible love.And it remains the city itself. Mark Rothko has a great observation about the relation between foreground and background in an art work: sometimes the personages (or the objects) have only the function to glorify the background ("... may limit space arbitrarily and thus heron his objects. Or he makes infinite space, dwarfing the importance of objects, causing them to merge and become part of the space world"). The same observation is somehow made by Malevich when analyzing the way Monet had rendered the Cathedral of Rouen: "...when the artist paints, and he plants the paint, and the object is his flower-bed, he must sow the paint in such a way that the object disappears, because it is merely a ground for the visible paint with which it is painted." Is this movie about people alienated by Hong Kong, or is it here a meditative poem about the city itself? One of the personages in the movie has an unexpected sentence, "Buddha said, If I don't descend into hell, who will?" The sentence passes quickly and seems at first sight without any meaning in the logic of the story. Maybe it offers the clue: Hong Kong, this space of "hyper-sub-reality" (as one of the reviewers puts it), this "Űbertraumstadt of ultimate nightmare" (apud another reviewer), actually offers the image of hell, and the heroes of the story descend there, why? To follow the archetype? And if we go again to the observation made by Malevich on Monet and Rouen Cathedral, here in Fallen Angels subject and city disappear in the gorgeous cinematic language: a great movie pushing the cinematic language to its ultimate expression. A couple of great creators: Wong Kar-Wai and Chris Doyle. Let me add here that another great contemporary cinematographer was also part in the team: Mark Lee Ping-Bin.And if I were to choose an image from Fallen Angels, this one would be: the city in the night with its endless traffic and movement and changing lights, near the narrow apartment where the hit-man inspects quietly the fax machine.

Wong Kar Wai doesn't play by the rules, and those who respond positively to his films wouldn't want it any other way. While he's recently gone a little more measured and controlled with style (relatively speaking) with In the Mood for Love and 2046, it's mostly in that he's now using things like dollies and steadi-cams. Looking at Chungking Express and, particularly, Fallen Angels, he reveals himself as a filmmaker total in trust with a style that in other hands would be simply amateurish. His camera, led on by Christopher Doyle, follows along these characters like in a slightly feverish documentary, with the accompanied narration adding the emphasis on inner thoughts and details. It's a crime drama, but it's also a fresh way to look at material that has a little bit of quirk, a heap-load of attitude, and at least a good lot of romance, or the lack of it or the pining for it with these characters. It's equally sweet and rough-edged, like an adorable motorcycle.For plot, there's not much: two male characters, one is a hit-man who's starting to feel the pressure of his job (ironically, he describes it as being a good one early on as "I'm a lazy person. I like people to arrange things for me"), and breaks off from his partner, a woman who cleans up his 'messes' of mass destruction, and then falls for a strange blonde girl. The other is a mute ex-con who robs people by being obnoxious at various one-night-stand type of jobs, and in the process meeting a girl whom has a freak-out one night (there's an amazing scene, I should add, where in one shot we see him fall completely for this girl with a soft blues song playing behind him describe this as his first love). At least, that's as much as I gathered from the essentials; there's also a sub-plot with the mute kid, He Zwhiu, and his father as he starts to videotape him all the time. But Wong isn't interested in plot mechanics as two central facets: mood of a scene on technical fronts, and a sensibility that's close to poetic intent.Wong's camera moves in a way that is a little dizzying, and it feels like it should be a shamble, a fiasco of an art-house item that doesn't transition well to the US. But it becomes apparent that its form is, at least, consistent to the intent at hand. We're so aware of the style that the characters are seemingly organic from this urban, post-modern spread. They're more than a little alienated (watch that shot where the woman is in the café, and the fight breaks out behind her without flinching an eyelash to the situation), and they have the tendencies of youth trapped in a situation they can only break out of (for one it's a way of life as work that gets mixed up due to emotions with the partner, the other with his father and going past disrobing the homeless and conning a family with ice cream).Wong Kar Wai presents this amusingly at times, a brisk sense of humor dropped in to let the audience know 'it's OK to laugh here and there, they ARE human after all with all their idiosyncrasies'. But at the same time there's a sorrow to the material that is given life by the hand-held, by the shots of characters in mirrors, by mixed media, by black and white shots thrown in, by editing that cuts off the head of the 180 degree rule here and there, by pumping in sad music and it does come close to diluting the emotional impact of the characters's fates. And yet, Wong has the soul of a romantic at heart, so to speak, and despite the fact that there's some pretty violence scenes in the picture (done in that hyper-speed style that is a little slow, a little fast in a way, as one has seen in many HK crime films) there's an intelligence that steers it from being TOO sloppy.This may be arguable, to be sure, in either direction; some may even call it a masterpiece of post-modernism as well as those who can't stand it period. I don't necessarily think it's even Kar-Wai's best film. But it inspires so many fresh images and thoughts I can't discard it as a warped slip-up from an otherwise avant-garde darling. If anything a film like Fallen Angels lifts up his reputation as the Chinese answer to Godard (minus, of course, the Maoism and the reading excerpts of books on camera).

Wong Kar-Wai is the modern cinema's premier poet of loss and longing. His characteristically enigmatic films capture the erratic rhythms and ephemeral nature of memory and torment: fleeting, fragmented, wandering only to return obsessively to its central foci.While Wong's debut, "As Tears Go By", was a relatively straightforward commercial riff on Scorsese's "Mean Streets" and the 'heroic bloodshed' style of Hong Kong street opera pioneered by action maestro John Woo, he would establish with "Days of Being Wild" and "Chungking Express" a signature style characterized by visual bravura mixed with interwoven and intensely introspective tales of emotionally isolated young people adrift in the shadow kingdom of urban postmodernity. Eschewing more traditional narrative formats for an elliptical self-referentiality that mirrors memory itself, Wong's films are rarely instantly accessible, but reward the patient viewer with intoxicating moods and contemplative brilliance."Fallen Angels" was originally conceived as something of a 'nightside' sequel/companion piece to "Chungking Express." Structurally and thematically it mirrors the latter with two separate plot lines, each centering on a pair of twentysomethings (a hit-man and his female 'agent' in one and a strange, mute confidence man and the girl he takes a shine to in the other) in search of love but unable or unwilling to find it in each other. Assorted camera tricks, fish eye lenses, slow motion sequences and the strategic use of a gloriously bittersweet pop soundtrack all help to capture a mood of frantic desperation and the distortions of memory and longing.Wong also invokes the first of his 'art' films, "Days of Being Wild," returning to its concern with the loss and meaning of identity in an impersonal world. Leon Lai's hit-man and Takeshi Kaneshiro's petty criminal both try - and fail - to remake their lives on this straight and narrow. One of them manages a peace of sorts with his failure - the other goes out out in a bittersweet blaze of glory. Wong also explores the way in which longing (mis)identifies others: his characters view each other through the distorted lens memory and desire - what they see is not reality, but a projection of their own dreams - and when the truth is made manifest, it is always the cruelest blow.