Friday, October 15, 2010

An Outstanding Synopsis Of The Movie Exiled

By Peggy Clements

Exiled is really its own thing in the world of action movies. If you've grown bored with the recent Hollywood trend of shaky cameras, incoherent action scenes and split second editing, Exiled is a breath of fresh air. If you want to see action that's clear, coherent, and carries a sort of odd, dreamlike quality, put Exiled on your movie downloads queue.

Years after a top ranked lieutenant in the Triad betrays his boss, the boss, played by Simon Yam, sends a pair of hitmen to take him out. Meanwhile, two members of the gang come to protect the man. These characters were all friends in the gang, and it's out of duty that the two hitmen come to kill their old partner. They come to a compromise and decide to pull off a big score to support the man's wife and child before settling their conflict.

These characters are all friends since their youth, and there's a sense of warmth and sentimentality as the five characters come to a compromise and decide to honor friendship before duty. They decide to pull off a big score to help support the hero's wife and child before settling their differences. The result is something much more personal than the usual "It's Just Business" approach to violence in gangster movies.

Johnnie To, the Hong Kong action legend, directed this film with a sense of sweetness and sentimentality and nostalgia. John Woo and Ringo Lam defined the Heroic Bloodshed genre alongside To with films like Hard Boiled and City on Fire, and To was always considered sort of the third wheel of the genre. This film, however, is much different from anything you might have seen from that era of Hong Kong action.

The movie has an odd, dreamlike quality to it. An opening gunfight has a bathroom door fly off its hinges and it twirls gracefully around the room until the firefight finally ends. Later we see a character throw a Red Bull can into the air, and the entire gunfight happens in slow motion before the can hits the ground. This is a bullet ballet.

The story isn't always quite as clear as the action, but this actually helps to improve the dreamlike quality of the film. To himself has admitted that he finds the film confusing and still hasn't quite made sense of it. Watch it for the characters and the action, though, and you'll be able to appreciate the movie in full.

The Heroic Bloodshed genre was defined as being an angry, violent group of films, largely as a reaction to the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong. The heroes would take on hundreds of enemies at a time in a symbol of the Hong Kong independent spirit against that of communist China. So it's interesting to see To taking the genre in a new direction. This film is defined by its themes of compassion and forgiveness, and there's an odd gentleness to even the most gruesome violence in the film.

It's truly a rare spectacle in the world of action. Even if you've seen everything John Woo and Ringo Lam have ever made, this movie will show you something you haven't seen before. It's definitely something to watch if you're looking for an action scene with its own approach to the usual shootouts and fight scenes.

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