Bullet In The Head

Hong Kong, 1967. Handsome, romantic Ben (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) is happily engaged to his sweetheart, Jane (Fennie Yeun). When his bosom friends, clownish Frank (Jacky Cheung) and bitterly ambitious Paul (Waise Lee), kill a local gangster, the trio look for an opportunity to get out of town and make big money. They agree to deliver medicine and Rolexes to a Saigon crime lord. Upon their arrival in war-torn Vietnam, however, a terrorist attack destroys the merchandise. Broke and desperate, the heroes ally themselves with Luke (Simon Yam), a CIA operative out to stop Leong from assisting the Vietcong. Subsequent events will challenge their friendship and change their lives.

Thanks to such blistering action films as THE KILLER and HARD-BOILED, director Woo is well known for pushing both action and emotion to near-hysterical levels; while this long and riveting movie amply displays Woo's trademark visual panache, it features greater emotional depth and complexity than any of his other works to date. At its best, BULLET IN THE HEAD evokes the same sense of inexorable fate that drives classical tragedies and classic noirs, pulling its characters into ever deeper trouble, testing their loyalty, bravery, and humanity.

Some viewers may find that Woo's approach goes too far over the top. But the director knows exactly what he's doing, and when the scene moves to a POW camp, he creates a sequence that rivals THE DEER HUNTER in horror and hopelessness. Woo's action set-pieces are as explosive as ever, with a shoot-out in a brothel and an attack on the POW camp standing out as masterpieces of staging and timing. The climactic showdown (a large section of which was cut from previous editions) may seem extreme by Western standards, but by this point, even viewers new to Woo's work will probably have become acclimated to the melodramatic conventions of HK cinema. BULLET IN THE HEAD was made in 1990 and released in an uncut director's version on the US art-house circuit in 1994. leave a comment