REVIEW: Exquisite Vengeance is Trademark Johnnie To

Although Hong Kong films are immensely popular among Americans, they seem to strike a chord mostly with a subset of young, eager fans. Average American moviegoers probably haven't heard of Johnnie To, but much worse, average filmmakers may not have heard of him either. I don't even dare to think how much better mainstream American movies would be if they showed even half the craftsmanship, energy and passion of To's latest, Vengeance, an underworld drama featuring the French pop star Johnny Hallyday.

Hallyday plays Costello, a 60-ish Frenchman who shows up in Macau at the bedside of his daughter (Sylvie Testud), who has miraculously survived a home invasion in which her husband and children were killed. He promises her he'll avenge the murders, and shortly thereafter finds a trio of hit men practically under his nose: Kwai, Chu and the duly named Fat Lok (played, respectively, by Anthony Wong, Lam Ka Tung and Lam Suet, all regulars in To's films) happen to be doing a job right in his hotel, an intricate maneuver in which the brutal gun blasts that signify the successful end of the mission are anticlimactic. The foreplay is the thing: To outlines with affectionate precision all the little things the hit men must do to get to that point, like delicately unhitching a door's chain guard from the outside.

These are not your average ham-fisted hit men -- one of them can look at a footprint and discern, for example, that the lug who made it puts most of his weight on one foot -- and Costello is coolly eager to have their help. He offers them not only a wad of cash, but the restaurant he runs in Paris -- Costello is a chef, but he's a chef with an unchef-like past. One of the three hit men, curious about his new employer, asks Costello if he knows how to use a gun; he responds by challenging Chu to a little contest to see who can reconstitute a disassembled gun faster, while blind-folded with a cloth dinner napkin. Guess who wins?

Costello cements the deal he's made with these men by snapping Polaroids of them (naturally camera-shy, they comply only reluctantly) and marking each one, in thick letters, with the appropriate name. The reason for this becomes clear later in the film, in a twist that could be viewed as either sentimental or elemental -- in the latter case, it's the kind of thing that can affect us on a deeply emotional level, if we're open to it.

What follows is a story of honor among criminals, of loyalty and of the ultimate uselessness of revenge. It also features a Frenchman in a trench coat. (Hallyday's actually looks as if it has been carefully preserved since the '70s.) In other words, at its core, Vengeance is a story you've seen a million times before, especially if you've ever seen a Hong Kong action movie, or even a Sam Peckinpah movie.

But my sense is that To, who has been working in the Hong Kong film industry since the mid-1980s, doesn't try to raise the stakes with each new picture. His aim isn't to introduce bigger, wilder twists or increasingly clever setups. Instead, he works at the granular level, making subtle refinements in his craft and his approach. Watching his recent pictures -- like the marvelous 2008 Sparrow (To's sideways homage to Jacques Demy, which never got a U.S. theatrical release) or the exhilarating, eloquent 2006 Exiled (another movie about honor among scoundrels) -- is to watch a filmmaker who appears to want to go backward and forward in time at once. He favors clean editing, which may be occasionally swift but tends not to be choppy. He tends to keep the camera blessedly stationary, as if aware that all that shaky, handheld business offers only a false fluidity. The violence in his movies is blunt but also discreet -- he can't bring himself to see brutality as pure poetry, but he can certainly locate the poetry in it. Maybe that's why his pictures, even with their timeworn themes, feel both old-school and modern at once. Emotionally and technically straightforward entertainments, they're just not the kind of movies anyone else, particularly in Hollywood, is making right now.

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