The Stand By Me of triad films. I'm glad I watched The Mission within the last month, because it really gave Exiled a "we're getting the old band back together" feel. I love watching these guys together, and clearly they love working together (and with To). So much is communicated in their glances and gestures to one another. While seemingly every major action director was still dragging out Matrix "bullet time" and stale 90s Hong Kong tricks, To is constantly experimenting and innovating with how to stage and film a shootout. Here billowing curtains, tarps, and misty blood add kineticism to the typically tense and tight fixed location gun play. It's extremely exciting, quirky, and funny, as I've come to expect from To, but unlike any of his other movies I've seen, I found this one genuinely moving (as opposed to just rousing, if that makes sense). Maybe that's just the cold medicine talking, I don't know.

One of the coolest movies I've ever seen.

A town with countless hitmen, one prostitute, one back alley doctor, two cops, and not a single civilian. The whole thing has a very spaghetti western feel to it, so much so that if they were to remake this as a western, and by god I hope they do, they wouldn't have to change a single thing.

Besides, and this is what separates this movie from anything else in the genre: No one stages a scene and moves the camera like Johnnie motherfucking To.

Where has Jonnie To been all my life?

I'm fairly certain this is my first To film, and if it isn't, then it is certainly the first to make a huge impression.

The look! The style! The ballet! The panache!

Are all of his films this gorgeous?

And now you will have to excuse me as I go through his huge filmography and start sourcing them.

Only previous experience with Johnnie To was Triad Election, which didn't make enough of an impression for me to think "I now must see every other film this guy has made." But this...this. First 20 minutes were a thing of ridiculous tension-building/tension-diffusing beauty, setting up an amazing dynamic of old friends divided by differing senses of where their loyalties now lie. And it just keeps following up exhilarating set pieces with moments that shift on a dime. Sure, there's unnecessary business like the goofy "24 hours until I retire" cop, and it never quite makes sense that Wo's wife is suddenly determined to kill everyone who seemed to be the only guys on his side. But every once in a while a piece of genre film-making--brutally effective and demonstrating a true mastery of the form--just tells you "I now must see every other film this guy has made." Mission accomplished.

Great gangster film, supported by excellent performances and a supremely satisfying ending. Characters are introduced, leave, and return in surprising ways, they're subjected to ludicrous and sometimes cruel circumstances, and I actually felt emotion for them by the end.

The way Johnnie To uses space and environments is extraordinary.

john woo, more like john whoo are yoou

please clap

clube dos cafajestes por johnnie to

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

Holy mothafucking shit que c’était solide comme gun fight!!!!

9,25/10

The blood sprays are worth the price of admission alone. Lot's of great friendship moments. Must watch.

just all-around chinese badassery at its finest.

the Red Bull can sequence is the best part of the whole thing tho

When the boys get drunk around the fire on the beach and try to pants Lam Suet :,)