Friday, October 15, 2010

Don't Miss Seeing The Adventure Film Exiled

By Peggy Clements

If you love action flicks, but you're getting tired of all this whiz bang, shaky camera stuff where you can't tell what the heck is going on, Exiled may be the antidote you're looking for. This makes any worthwhile action movie downloads list because the action isn't so darned all over the place. Everything is clear and coherent, you can tell what's going on. You rarely see action this... Graceful.

Years after a top ranked lieutenant in the Triad betrays his boss, the boss, played by Simon Yam, sends a pair of hitmen to take him out. Meanwhile, two members of the gang come to protect the man. These characters were all friends in the gang, and it's out of duty that the two hitmen come to kill their old partner. They come to a compromise and decide to pull off a big score to support the man's wife and child before settling their conflict.

There's a warmth and sweetness to what happens. Where most gangster movies are defined by that cold, impersonal "Just Business" approach to violence, here, none of the characters really want to shoot at each other, they've been friends since they were young, and they seem upset that it's come to this.

This movie comes from Johnnie To, the legendary Hong Kong director who came up around the same time as John Woo and Ringo Lam, in the Heroic Bloodshed era. Where those movies were driven by anger at the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong, Exiled was made after the takeover, when it was shown that things hadn't changed quite as much as the Hong Kong people were expecting.

The movie has an odd, dreamlike quality to it. An opening gunfight has a bathroom door fly off its hinges and it twirls gracefully around the room until the firefight finally ends. Later we see a character throw a Red Bull can into the air, and the entire gunfight happens in slow motion before the can hits the ground. This is a bullet ballet.

The story is fairly confusing. You have to simply watch it for the emotional drive of the characters, because the plot line is all over the place, however, this actually helps the movie's dream like quality. Even the director has said that he didn't know exactly what was going on while directing the film, and was hoping that he would figure it out in editing. When that didn't work out, he decided that, maybe someday, it'll make sense.

The Heroic Bloodshed genre was defined as being an angry, violent group of films, largely as a reaction to the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong. The heroes would take on hundreds of enemies at a time in a symbol of the Hong Kong independent spirit against that of communist China. So it's interesting to see To taking the genre in a new direction. This film is defined by its themes of compassion and forgiveness, and there's an odd gentleness to even the most gruesome violence in the film.

Exiled is a rare action film, and certainly one to see if you want something a little different than the usual shaky-cam shootout flick. It's really a refreshing breath of fresh air if you're sick and tired of not being able to tell who's shooting who and how the heck that guy got on the roof. Definitely a change of pace. - 40726

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