Retro Review by Joseph Bullock
Perhaps the greatest work of its maverick, genre-defining auteur, this Hong Kong masterpiece has often been compared to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). At first, the similarities are obvious. They are both hellishly bleak movies set in Vietnam. They represent the chaotic artistic zenith of their creators. They are about moral failings – violence, betrayal, coercion, what war does to the male psyche. And, more covertly, the efforts to produce and finance them were consistently troubled. They suggest to fans a mythical self-sacrifice at the altar of cinema. You see this film and cannot help but thinking that its “cost”, so to speak, was never just an economic one.
That said, it is difficult to divorce the finished product from how it was made. After clashes with influential producer Tsui Hark over the direction of the Better Tomorrow series (Bullet was originally intended to be the third, a prequel), Woo had to mostly self-fund this effort, which was still heavily edited by Golden Princess for theatrical distribution. While A Better Tomorrow (1986) and The Killer (1989) were breakout hits that allowed him to transcend Hark’s once vital influence, Woo was not as enshrined in the canon of great action directors as he would become. Truly, the risk of this project hasn’t been matched since.
The resulting movie is a frenzy in the best way possible. Concerning three disillusioned friends who leave Hong Kong for wartime Vietnam after accidentally killing a gang leader, it merges the filmmaker’s iconic heroic bloodshed with Deer Hunter style Viet Cong sequences, riot scenes laced with allusions to the Tiananmen Square massacre, and – at its start – the conventions of crime cinema. The fierce third act shifts back to Hong Kong, where it becomes a propulsive, densely symbolic revenge piece. These shifts are blatant though always appropriate, charting emphatically and with great skill the different meanings that violence connotes in Woo’s filmography.
A major continuity with his most celebrated works is that it is ostensibly a male melodrama. Likewise, bloodshed is mostly a catalyst for regaining honour, his core theme. Typically, in his kinetic, multi-stage shootouts, we suspect that our heroes are going to beat the odds, kill vast swathes of henchmen, and escape with their dignity renewed or intact. Here, however, in slower, more dismal scenes, the three friends lose agency and must witness murder and injury laid bare. The two sides struggle relentlessly and leave death sprawling in their wake. His trademark slow-motion becomes excruciating rather than exhilarating, intensifying the corrosive, traumatic memories that war imbues in the protagonists.
This subversive perspective is present from the opening shots, which show a dance class. Ben (Tony Leung) embraces his girlfriend while a jazzy, slightly cheesy version of “I’m a Believer” plays. This quaint, mildly superficial glimpse of young love shifts to a brutal gang fight while the music continues. Perhaps due to the low status of its participants, who commit crimes to pay for Ben’s wedding or to make small change, the violence is already a kind of pathetic drive towards destruction. Far less operatic than the duel-wielding professionalism of The Killer, we feel each snap of the neck or bottle of glass smashed. By unexpectedly pairing romance with violence, Woo highlights a sense of perversity while also explaining with great pathos what leads the three men to attempt smuggling in a warzone.
Indeed, the next time we hear the iconic ‘60s hit, Ben is just about to leave the toilet of a bar in South Vietnam. A man in a white suit enters, gestures for him to move slightly, and then shoots an unarmed, pissing man behind Ben – blood splattering against the white tiles of the long urinal. What is remarkable about the scene is not Woo’s inventive display of violence (meticulously slow, emphasising each shifting, fragmented texture in the frame), but the odd, vaguely romantic aspect of it all. We cut to a close-up of the killer, Luke; followed by an intimate dolly towards Ben’s passive expression. It is a violent meet-cute, tinted with rose-coloured lights and suffused with the trite optimism of a popular love song.
Of course, these features are also deeply ironic. If murder and crime are ways out for our three leads, Ben, Frank (Jacky Cheung), and Paul (Waise Lee), then they are also their reckoning. Similarly, the view of American culture proposed by this scene – and throughout – is that of an idealistic façade that damns those who inhabit it. Ben’s room in Hong Kong is plastered with images of Elvis and JFK, suggesting this nebulous desire for another life. Other cultures and regimes fare even more poorly: the last time Ben sees his wife before leaving is at a protest where HK police ruthlessly beat young protesters, and Viet Cong militants are portrayed as pitilessly savage.
Pervading these moments with an almost unbearable aura of apocalypse means that it does not feel particularly didactic. In terms of what we actually witness, it is much more a story about hell on earth than factional conflict. Thus, the profoundly uncomfortable Viet Cong scene is a harrowing and revelatory climax that completely destroys the three friends. While they do eventually shoot their way out, they are made to use violence in harrowing and contradictory ways that are inevitably less satisfying for a viewer. Frank – played from the outset, rather brilliantly, as a kind-hearted joker – is forced to execute American prisoners of war, laughing in incredulous horror as he does so.
Without spoiling too much, the jarring, macabre action here leads to a schism in the relationship. Someone is betrayed and things will never quite be the same again. The resolution, which drags the trio back to Hong Kong, albeit at odds, is appropriately visceral and cathartic. It is easy to underestimate John Woo as a director of drama; he is known in near exclusivity for his shootouts. On the other hand, the highly expressive choice to have Frank laugh while committing murder is key to the thematic richness of Bullet in the Head, which stems too from other incisive contrasts.
Not only are the characters’ fates foreshadowed from the Hong Kong section, but the insertion of flashbacks into the final images of the film bring a heart-breaking, fatalistic sadness to this tale of corrupted friendship. In them, Ben, Frank, and Paul ride their bicycles on the docks at night, drenched in rain and laughing gleefully. The footage is slowed, highlighting its role as a pivotal moment in their lives yet also a fleeting, illusory one. Teenage innocence clashes with the disillusionment of those who have gone to war. Only by showing us what is lost can Woo make it so compelling to hope that enough bloodshed will bring it all rushing back.