Exiled.

"Johnnie To may not be the last man standing, but he is the lone Hong Kong action director who's done his best work in the aftermath of the crown colony's reversion to China," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "In a sense, the feverishly active To is out of step with history—and, as its title suggests, his latest gangster opus, Exiled, revels in that sense of anachronism."

"Get ready for shoot-outs, and you better like them absurd-slash-borderline ridiculous," writes Matt Singer at IFC News. "Though the action is a bit murkier than, say, To's Breaking News (2004), the characters are richer and the story more satisfying than his recent (and arguably over-praised) Election and Triad Election."

"From the twilit last-reckoning setting of Macau at the time of the Chinese handover, to a pace that alternates lush set pieces with breather stretches, Exiled evokes a tighter Leone western with its cinematic confidence shared by filmmaker and gangsters alike," writes Nicholas Rapold in the L Magazine.

Updates, 8/30: "It's a remarkable combination of everything expected from an action movie: bad guys in trench coats, women in peril, bullets galore," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "But it's also infused with surprisingly effective ingredients that rarely appear in this kind of fast and furious amusement: Sincere, affable characters, light-hearted humor and an entirely believable fondness for the innate beauty of life and death."

"The most entertaining movie released so far this year was made in Hong Kong in 2006," announces R Emmet Sweeney at the Reeler. "A Wild Bunch riff in love with the pure, plastic beauties of the medium, Exiled is also a glistening showpiece of sinuous tracking shots, fetishistic slow motion, and a ritualistic sense of gun-play."

Updates, 8/31: "I still meet people who praise The Departed (an entertaining and beautifully made picture) but who draw a blank when I mention Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Infernal Affairs, the extraordinary cop drama on which The Departed is based," notes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "I don't blame their reaction on ignorance: I just think that a lot of movie fans who might enjoy the work of some of the Hong Kong filmmakers are intimidated by the clubby insiderishness of so many of the fans. It's hard to know what you might like when you don't even know where to start. That's why I'd put To's Exiled - which opens in New York today, in Los Angeles next week, and in other US cities over the next few months - into the category of Hong Kong movies that even people who think they don't care about Hong Kong movies should see."

"This tale of childhood buddies turned hit men squaring off against a malevolent gang boss in 1998 Macau - on the eve of that former Portuguese colony's absorption by China - is the kind of film where flames roar, waves crash and dropped bullets thud like bowling balls," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "Mannered as it is, however, Exiled is a tonic - a film that delivers all the visceral satisfactions of a super-macho action picture (close-quarters gun battles; slow-motion Wild Bunch-style side-by-side struts) and unabashedly sentimental depictions of loyalty and tenderness as well as plot twists that are surprising, often bizarre, yet feel just right."

"Nothing about Exiled is as resonant as To's best work, but it's a clever homage to Sam Peckinpah, right down to the clouds of bloody mist that fill the barroom as To's anti-heroes make their last stand," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

"As in last year's Triad Election, the shadow of China looms over Exiled with a 'party's over' vibe," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. "The gun battles are the best part of To's film, which, despite its refreshingly tender treatment of male friendship, seems attenuated otherwise, the pensive final chapter of some longer epic that was never made."

"To has moved well beyond the parody of the John Woo school of grandiose male melodrama action cinema he scathingly exhibited in A Hero Never Dies (1998)," writes Daniel Kasman. "It may come as a shock after the resolutely anti-romantic Election 2 that Exiled’s first scene is of stoic, trenchcoat-clad men in paramilitary coiffures flicking cigar ash and silently waiting the arrival of their target photographed in stately crane shots and Kurosawa-style widescreen blocking.... If he is going to go back to these standards for entertainment, it is going to be done with a full acknowledgment of the bankruptcy of the caricatures and of their on-screen glory, even when the film whole-heartedly does what it can to give them their magnificent worth."

Updates, 9/5: "At his best, [To's] films are glossy, stylistically impeccable exercises in transcendent shallowness (Running Out of Time) or canny referentiality, as in the deliberately outsized nocturnal poetics and macho Super-Mann gestures of A Hero Never Dies," writes Mark Asch for Stop Smiling:

For a long time, though, he couldn't play it straight without resorting to the kind of slapstick interludes that marred his tone-deaf Stray Dog remake PTU, or the too-many-balls-in-the-air overreaching of his undercooked media commentary Breaking News. For that matter, The Mission was less than the sum of its parts, all set pieces and no connective tissue.

Eventually, To found his voice by reaching back further, with the grim viscerality, Gordon Willis-aping palette, and operatic scale - founded, like the Godfather movies, on father-son plots and the underworld's inexorable corruption - of Election and Triad Election.

"How many times am I gonna have to rave about Exiled before you go see it?" asks Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Updated, 9/6: "Buoyed by humor in all the right places, the script is dryly funny," writes Craig Phillips at the Guru. "To isn't just winking at American genre films, but at other Hong Kong action flicks, and his own filmography. By the time we get to scene around a campfire after the men pull of their heist, with one of them blowing on a harmonica, it all makes perfect sense."

Posted by dwhudson at August 29, 2007 6:49 AM