"There's no rank among friends".
Closer in spirit to the big Hollywood Vietnam films than to Tsui's A Better Tomorrow 3, which means it is a big imperialist spectacle about the effects of the war in the chosen leads much more than a movie about Vietnam. The specifics are erased into one big wave of emotion (as usual in Woo impossible to separate from violence). The real subject is morality in time of war; when state sanction murder is the rule, how can man react, what is fair and what is not. It is an even more radical update of Cheh's code of honor. War is of course hell, the vietcongs subhuman torturers too long under its spell to remember…

Finishing off the year with a previously-unseen John Woo crime-epic. What was originally meant to be the third instalment of A Better Tomorrow, Bullet in the Head attempts to be his most ambitious film yet, a large-scale war-based drama combined with his usual brand of heroic bloodshed. The result for me isn't up there with his absolute best, but it's still a more than worthy addition to his filmography.

Set around the backdrop of the late 1960s, Ben, Paul, and Frank are members of a low-level street gang in the streets of Hong Kong, who are forced to flee the city when a rival gangster is accidentally killed during a conflict. They end up in Vietnam, attempting to make a…

Brutal. Brilliant. Irreverent. Silly.

It's 1967. From the student riots in Hong Kong to the war in Vietnam, the world is on fire. But no matter how horrible the situation, John Woo understands that opera can be made of it.

A husband and wife breaking up next to a bomb disposal situation, illustrated with cross-cutting between the emotional dismantling of the characters’ relationship and the physical cutting of wires on the ticking time bomb, is one of John Woo’s finest moments in a career stacked with fine moments.

The “God of Song” Jacky Cheung’s performance as Frank is over-the-top hilarious.

This is big, true, Woo. Self-financed and made, in part, against the Hong Kong system, as he was at odds…

Der Film startet mit dem typischen John Woo Kitsch, was ich nichtmal umbedingt schlimm finde und irgendwie auch dazugehört.
Aber startet sowas von schnell und die Übergange von einzelnen Szenen sind so plötzlich, dass es schwer zu verstehen ist, was hier eigentlich läuft.
Aber so nach ner halben Stunde macht alles mehr Sinn und man gewöhnt sich an die schnelle Szenenwechseleuphorie.
Und ja die Action ist wieder voll übertrieben, aber so ist sie auch verdammt geil.
Schauspieltechnisch auch einbisschen over the Top als sagen wir mal "normale" Action Filme, was aber sogar eher positiv ist. Ähnlich wie bei Ringo Lam (der mir als Regisseur aber garnicht gefällt).
Was aber John Woo als Regisseur so besonders neben seiner Action macht ist,…

A combination of the visceral, sentimental, and high octane in this John Woo Deer Hunter-style epic.

Woo’s own version of melodrama is near perfection as he depicts the unravelling friendship of three men who have grown up together now finding themselves through various incidents, fleeing Hong-Kong and becoming embroiled in the middle of the Vietnam war.

Sadness and gun fire as the act of pulling a trigger is under the lens, the emotional response in a human to do this. Especially brutal when the characters find themselves in a Vietcong concentration camp. Morality is unpacked and dissected.

The film’s emotional, supercharged ending (I believe a studio intervention, there is a more subdued version which still packs a punch) is a…

Even tho my girlfriend didn’t enjoy this as much as I did. I still had lots of fun. 

This movie is about some visceral and brutal times that three friends have after escaping from Hong Kong to the middle of the war in Vietnam after being responsible for some crimes. 

Mannnnnn this movie has WAY more action than I thought and a tragic ending that I didn’t expect at all. The characters are super cool and omg Tony Leung will forever be my god. 

The character of Luke was one of my favorites, he was just so badass and his first scene was maybe my favorite of all the movie. 
After some amazing sequences of amazing action in this nightclub…

John Woo has a signature style all of his own, there is absolutely no doubt about that.
After the first 15 minutes I thought I was going to have to turn this off.
Opening with some surreal melodrama it almost seemed like the characters were going to burst out into West Side Story sing song.
Thank the lord they did not.

Once the action begins there is very little let up.
A bloody ballet of bullets and brutality that Woo perfected and had undoubted influence on the action genre the world over.
The cartoon levels of violence are a hoot with cigars that turn out to be dynamite being a particular highlight.

In contrast to the highs of the whamming…

Just because you are trying to make historical epic does not mean every single moment needs to be EPIC. After a certain point the knob is cranked to 11 and it feels like every scene is the movies climax which is just draining after a while and makes the movie feel way longer than it actually is. It's a shame too because there was some good stuff going on. I liked the setting and the initial impetus for the plot. Unfortunately the movies leaves a lot of that behind and it feels like the first half hour has little relation to the rest of the movie. The finale is kind of emblematic of this disconnect. Despite revisiting a location from…