Yashua Kimbrough (jimniexperience)
Second movie in Brotherhood of Assassin's TrilogyTale of Brotherhood following two duos of henchmen - two sent to kill and two sent to protect - helping their old hitman friend complete one last job so he leaves money behind for his family ..First Part follows henchmen protecting Wo
Second Part follows henchmen exile and search for gold
Sevket Erhat
I did not know what to expect from Exiled when I have watched it for the first time in 2006 and it blew me away. After watching Johnnie To documentary - Johnnie Got His Gun, I have felt the need to watch it again.As many reviews said before this one is Johnnie To's modern day western. Over the top violence (a door that keeps flying in the air by shooting, spurting blood) at a setting with no police around at all is the order of the day.Nothing bad can be said about the cast of this movie. All the great guys from 1999's The Mission is here. Add Simon Yam to the mix and that is as good as it gets. Female character could be more beautiful but that's life.The great cast from The Mission returns in this one.The story is simple but character development is somewhat shallow. With 15 more minutes of character development of good guys and the bad guys and this would be a classic.As far as the shooting goes this is as good as it gets. Johnnie To is really master of its craft when it comes to movies with guns, lots of guns. The final shootout at the hotel is one of the best ever, competing with John Woo's Hard-Boiled which I think is the best movie ever.If you love action movies with lots of guns blazing this is the movie for you.
c_s_p_r
My first thought after watching the movie was that I had seen a new Tarantino movie about gangster life in Hong Kong. So if you like Tarantino movies I think you will like this also, although it is not good as best Tarantino movies.The best things in this movie are the believable characters and the sudden surprises in the plot. There is also nice humour found here and there to cheer up the viewer. The plot worked nicely but after the movie I had the feeling that the script could have been also better to make this a real classic. However, the movie is entertaining and has something in the atmosphere that Hollywood action movies do not have. Worth to watch.
moimoichan6
If "Exiled" could at first appears as a cold style exercise that focuses itself on the mathematical numbers of five and two, the movie is at the end one (if not the) best Johnny To's movie, and carries within a incredible felling of freedom and melancholia. I think that with this movie, Johnny To archive to reach the level of the best of his older masters, like John Woo or Tsui Hark.FIVE : That's around this number that the all movie seems to be build. "Exiled" tells the story of five men against the world, in five parts (that means five gigantic gunfights). But the logical of the number five is broken by one of the member of this gang of five : Wo, who left them years ago. The movie stars when he comes back to Macao, where his four old friends, his wife and his baby, are waiting for him. But the unity is already lost : when they met again, two wants to kill him, and two wants to protect him. There's no wonder why this breaker of symmetry rapidly died, when he refuses to bend over the mathematical beauty of the movie. The former gang will indeed try to find a fifth member (it will be a moral mercenary), but they'll be only four to finish their road. Anyway, the movie isn't rationally build on the number five, but rapidly chooses errancy and coincidences to makes its way. That's the way the gang also fallows when he lets a coin game chooses its path. It's then in in number two, like the two faces of a coin, that the movie will find its unity. TWO : With the use of that coin, the exiled of the movie takes the face of the duality. The gunfights, if you watch them carefully, are also duels (even with multiple characters and combinations). The number two is indeed at the beginning of Johnny To's project, witch is to combine the codes of a classical Hongkongue polar (with it's killers with sunglasses and ethical from another time, its alway on the move camera, that shoots the killings like musical ballets, etc.) with the ones of 60's European westerns (...Per Qualche Dollari in piu is directly quoted, the atmosphere of the movie reminds the Peckinpah's ones, the OST is a pastiche of Moricone, etc.). It's like the movie itself is a cultural translation of Macao, the Chinese island where the movie occurs, and that has been a Portuguese colony for years. In that original mixture, the movie reminds me of "Cowboy Bebop" (an anime that also mixes Asian culture and occidental western in order to creates feeling of nostalgia and freedom) or of a reverse "Kill Bill".But this cultural duality is like an echo of the personal style of Johnny To, that always breaks his beautiful gunfights with lighter and melancholic scenes. This fusion and complementarity of the style with its subject creates a great movie, full of freedom, that becomes magnificent in its last killing, beautifully seen through the eyes of a can of Red Bull.
