The Head Hunter is most significant now for being a very early feature film outing for the soon-to-be-massive action star Chow Yun Fat. It's a pretty rough and ready effort in fairness but it has some good things about it. It focuses on a Vietnam veteran who works simultaneously as a movie stuntman and as a professional killer. He ends up in a personal vendetta against an unsavoury character from his past in Vietnam.
This one suffers a bit from having a messily conveyed plot-line. It often seems a lot more complex than it really is. It's also quite a bit more downbeat in tone than is typical for Hong Kong action flicks. In fact the martial arts quotient is more marginalised here, with more space for proper thriller material. There's some violence and grim moments sprinkled throughout and the serious tone ensures they are delivered in a more direct manner than most films of this type. It's still not a particularly good film though really, in that its story just isn't presented terrible well. On the other hand, I did find it quite amusing to hear a bunch of music from a smattering of famous western composers used throughout, from the likes of John Barry (James Bond), Goblin (Dawn of the Dead) and John Carpenter. Clearly these tunes were 'borrowed' by film-makers from a culture with somewhat liberal copyright laws.
On the whole, this one is lacking in a number of ways but it has its moments.
