Johnny To has recently become the critic's HK director to tout. He certainly has a stylistic flair for gangster movies but I am not familiar with his martial art films so this was a treat.
In terms of story, the movie is certainly a throwback to the HK films of the seventies. An illiterate young man travels to a town to find the best friend of his recently deceased father. He wants to retrieve a prized possession of his father's that the friend is holding on to. He finds the man (Ti Lung) working at a cloth factory that's being harassed by the local crime boss. We meet the owner of the factory, a beautiful widow. The young man also meets a beautiful young woman who's a teacher so he decides to have her teach him how to spell his name. Of course the young man is thrust into the middle of a conflict.
The story is played with a comic touch that carries the film for most of the way until the end which is quite serious. For me, what didn't work is how the exaggerated, wide angle, cartoony film technique was really unsuited for the end of the film. The action is very sped up during some tragic scenes. I started watching HK kung fu films during the end of the Shaw era and I've never warmed up to the kung fu film style of the 1990's. Too many cuts (move, move, cut, move, cut, punch, punch, cut) and too many sloppily composed action scenes. It seems every film had to have a scene with the hero running on the heads and shoulders of a crowd. IN Johnny To's defense, he seems to do an average of 4 films a year and that's not enough time to really make a great fight scene.
If you like 90's style HK action, this is a good film. For aficionado's of classic Shaw, this might not be that exciting.
