Blowing Up the Movies by Robin D. Laws

Author:Robin D. Laws [Laws, Robin D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlas Games
Published: 2015-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

The Mission

Gestures of Comradeship

1999. The air has been going out of the HK movie scene for several years. Now, in the wake of the Asian economic crisis, budgets have been slashed to the bone. Johnnie To has been making films for years, including a co-directing credit on the genre-blending masked feminist avenger flick Heroic Trio (1993). With the previous year’s heroic bloodshed revival A Hero Never Dies (1998), he has just found his trademark style, in which laconic protagonists strive to impose order on an often arbitrary world. He already has two other 1999 titles in the can: Where a Good Man Goes, in which a gangster tries to retire to a lonely rooming house, and the cat-and-mouse thriller Running Out of Time.

With The Mission, he makes his first masterpiece, finding inspiration in limitation. The production lacks the budget to buy a proper supply of film stock. To has to work with salvaged bits and ends. So for his tale of a team of bodyguards who assemble to protect a triad leader under assassination threat, he adjusts his action vocabulary. Just as he has to choose his shots carefully and shoot in short, contained bursts, so do his killers and bodyguards. The fights of The Mission follow a wait, move, stop, shoot, wait, move, stop rhythm. The combatants don’t rush toward each other to engage in close combat. They hang back and pay attention to factors Feng Shui’s combat rules shunt to one side: cover, and the comparative range of weapons. The fights become more about suspense than thrills. During a battle in a mall attached to their client’s offices, they wait for new killers to move into view and then take them down. The use of pauses drives up tension. When someone gets hit, they simply drop—no wires or leaps or other bravura flourishes that amp up a John Woo fight.

Building a satisfactory set of rules to emulate this combat style would be an intriguing challenge, but it sure wouldn’t be Feng Shui.

What the film offers us as FS2 fodder instead lies in the ways it brings out its central themes, the bonds of comradeship.

When killers try to take out Mr. Lung, a triad boss in slick businessman mode, his younger brother Frank (Simon Yam) hires a small team of bodyguards to keep him alive:

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