2006 - EXILED, bang, bang, you're dead and shot through with a lot of holes

The director Johnnie To filmed Exiled a film that was considered his comeback.  Since I have never seen any Johnnie To films I'm not sure what he was coming back from or where he went.

In any case, Exiled is the usual Hong Kong action stuff, an incomprehensible story, some very suspect plot coincidences, men being men especially with guns, lots and lots of stylized and pretty cool gunfights.  Which all adds up to yet another over the top action flick.

The story involves childhood friends who are now killers, the beginning of the film features them shooting at each other in an empty apartment.  Suddenly they all stop and decide to furnish the apartment which is now full of holes instead.  Apparently this scene was to show the four friends as members of rival triad gangs being ordered to kill each other but deciding to resume their friendship  instead of killing each other.

I know all of this only because I read the Wikipedia entry for Exiled to find out what the hell was going on after I watched it.

The film features Anthony Wong the Al Lettiere of the Hong Kong film world.  Al Lettiere was a go to actor who specialized in bad guy roles and was usually shot by Charles Bronson,  Clint Eastwood or John Wayne by the end of any film he appeared in.

 Johnnie To has been acclaimed as a director who has uses stylized visuals to tell a story rather than conventional film techniques.  This just means that in the case of Exiled, all of the violence is used to keep the view distracted from the lack of story.

100 minutes.