John Woo’s American movies have been pretty popular (Mission: Impossible 2, Face/Off), but I’ve always heard that you have to dig into the foreign film section to find his really good stuff. I thought Hard Boiled was great action-packed fun, but Bullet in the Head is considered by many fans and critics to be Woo’s masterpiece: an action film that is also a heavy drama.
Bullet in the Head is about three best friends in Hong Kong in the late 1960s. These boys don’t have a care in the world… life is about drinking, girls, and street-gang brawls. In fact the opening scene is a carefully choreographed fight scene that looks like it was lifted right out of Rebel Without a Cause mixed with almost dance-like moves.
On the day of Ben’s (Tony Leung’s) wedding celebration, Frank (the extremely expressive live-wire Jacky Cheung) gets mixed up with another gang and gets the crap beaten out of him. Well, boys stick together, so Ben leaves the wedding party, and with their other friend Paul (Waise Lee), they go in search of revenge, ultimately (and somewhat accidentally) killing the rival gang’s leader. Oops. The boys have to flee Hong Kong, which is in the throes of student riots and violence, so they decide to go to a place where they think they can earn a little money while they’re out of sight for awhile: Saigon.
Now, Vietnam in the late 60s isn’t exactly the best place to run to, so of course after some gunfights and tussles with the wrong crowd (involving a trunk full of gold that everyone wants their hands on), they get captured by the Viet Cong and are thrown into a prisoner-of-war camp. The camp sequence is astonishing in its visual and emotional violence, and is often compared to the Russian roulette sequence of The Deer Hunter… it is extremely disturbing. The loyalties of the friends are tested, and the most basic true personalities are revealed in the most harrowing circumstances. The story eventually goes back to Hong Kong, where the friends must confront each other, and face the past.
Bullet in the Head is not for the faint of heart. Many of the gunfights are cartoonish in their violence, like most action movies these days, but Bullet packs an emotional punch that surprised me. In the prison camp scene, it is not necessarily the physical violence that is horrifying, but the fact that you watch these men’s mentalities deteriorate in the face of pure survival-instinct.
The acting is first rate, especially Leung and Cheung, and of course the cinematography is fabulous. This movie has an intensity that leaves you feeling emotionally spent, and how often can you say that about an action flick? Bullet in the Head is a cut above most American action movies, and it will haunt you long after the closing credits have rolled.
