Courtesy IFC Films
Johnnie To doesn’t take long to get his viewers’ hearts pumping in his first English-language film. Within minutes, a bucolic family scene is disrupted by a bullet to the face, and it feels like coming home. There is not a lot terribly new in Vengeance—plot, action sequence, even actors will seem familiar, mostly because they are. But To does good work here with a new leading man and for those who have longed for some new Hong Kong action when the genre seems to have lost its legs, Vengeance is like comfort food. For those who aren’t familiar with the genre, the film does a good job of hitting high points.
Johnny Hallyday plays Francis Costello, a French restaurateur with suspiciously good marksmanship, who takes up his daughter’s demand for vengeance after her family is wiped out by Triad hitman. Why is irrelevant. Who is largely irrelevant. It’s the how that the film takes up with so much joie de vivre.
As the hit men hired by Costello to help him complete his task, To reunites cast members Anthony Wong, Lam Ka Tung , and Lam Suet who played together in To’s 2006 film, Exiled. Using their connections, the three quickly lead Costello to his targets, family men working the day jobs at the Hong Kong docks. Rather then anonymously killing, our protagonists wait honorably as the men picnic with their families before facing the confrontation. Humanity, however, will not spare lives and cinematographer Cheng Siu-Keung uses chiaroscuro brilliantly in the ensuing battle. Discovering that both trios work for the same sleazy Triad boss, George Fung (Simon Yam, also from Exiled), Kwai, Chu, and Fat Lok choose Costello over Fung and move in for the next kill.
Costello’s rapidly fading memory, caused by a bullet lodged in his brain from some past battle, requires a stream of post-its and photos to keep him on task. When he can no longer carry on, his hired hands become brothers-in-arm who foreswear past allegiances in order to follow through in his stead, only to go down in a smiling, suicidal, beautiful blaze of glory. So of course, only Costello can complete the cycle, and the film’s final shoot out is among To’s finest, as Costello desperately tries to fulfill his mission without any clear sense of why or who he is killing or even what revenge is. Only the name “George Fung” scrawled by Kwai on his gun keeps his focus.
True to his Hong Kong lineage (or really, that of any number of Westerns, gangster pics, or buddy films), To tackles themes of loyalty, duty, friendship, and revenge. But his age shows through in their final treatment. While the film exuberantly frames moon-lit shoot outs and ammunition-fueled showdowns, Costello’s loss of memory underscores a greater sense of loss, a period coming to a close. Vengeance depicts a warrior ultimately out of place in his time, unable to move away from his script but unlikely to garner any more leading man roles. As the film closes on Costello at the beach, surrounded by children and cared for by Big Mama (played by Michelle Ye), we see an assassin without memory of the code he has lived by. Like some aged Ye Ye, playing among the grandchildren, Costello ends the film laughing inanely, memory used up, out of place and out of time.
