Excellent cinematography, good choreography, OK story, amateur acting, disappointing directing and cheesy screenplay
What stood out for me in this film was the excellent cinematography by Takuro Ishizaka, and the main reason I scored this film as high as I did.
Next plus was the good choreography for the action scenes, especially the last 20 mins of the film.
The story itself (although we've seen it before) wasn't bad, but wasn't written well into a screenplay. Although the pace wasn't slow, the 106 min length felt longer with the long dragged out scenes and cheesy prolonged slow-mo parts. This film needed to be edited down to a max 80 mins.
Most of the subtitles didn't make any sense, but I'm guessing some 3rd party translator messed those up, so I wont consider that in my rating, but it did make the sub-par acting from most of the cast look very amateurish, as I didn't get to fully immerse myself in each character.
Then there's John Woo's directing, which at times felt like it was his early amateur work, and at other times felt like some grade 8 drama student put it together. He failed to direct his actors properly, as some performed certain scenes so badly, the director should have called a re-shoot. Clearly not his best work in the directing, writing and editing departments.
Throughout the entire film, I had already decided to give this film a 4 or 5/10, but the last 20 mins of fast paced action, plot twists and good choreography redeemed the score to a slightly better 6/10. Had the writing been tighter with less 'cheese', it could have been a 7 or 8/10
