BIG BULLET
(Chinatown Video)
Reviewed by Jonathan
Marshall
Big Bullet - together with the more successful, impressive Downtown
Torpedoes - is the latest in a series of Hong Kong ‘brat-pack’ films
including actors like the ever cute’n’cuddly Theresa Lee, the
suitably stoic Jordan Chan, and featuring Lau Ching-Wan,
who was so mesmerising in Full Alert. Big Bullet starts well enough. Lau
is your standard hyper-stressed bad-boy cop, with a slick friend higher up who prevents
him from getting fired (played by Francis Ng Chun Yu from Full Alert,
again giving a weighty performance alongside Lau). The dark, greyish
color of the cinematography and frequent use of skewed angles also gives the intro a
suitably tense, mobile, potentially bleak mood. Once our stylish bad guys are introduced,
we quickly move to a fantastic gun battle in the street, and a subsequent foot-chase,
closely modelled on the icy determination and heavy-duty automatic fire employed in Michael
Mann’s Heat.
Unfortunately the film quickly spirals from there into ever more
derivative, boring action and filler. The busy cinematography never again moves beyond the
self-conscious, by-the-numbers approach which the early scenes only barely rose above,
while the locations are flattened by the relentless use of blue floods and cold
fluorescent light - we even get an incredibly obvious, misplaced use of slow strobe
lighting. The narrative focus is buried by the ‘ensemble cast’ pretensions of
the film, with the lead character’s obsessions never again being explored, while
everyone else chimes in with their own personal idiosyncrasies, stories and subplots.
There is even a stupid finale involving corrupt soldiers who just suddenly land in the
middle of the narrative for no real reason. Both the villains and the heroes seem all but
indestructible most of the time, while insignificant characters die in droves. To add
insult to injury, we do not even get the usual fun, cheesy, orchestral-electronica score
of Hong Kong film, but a banal collection of derivative, self-important, bland symphonic
gestures (tense bit: here comes the high-pitched strands of a violin!). Big Bullet is
almost worth watching for the first twenty minutes, but if you want video schlock, there
are plenty of more fun choices (like The Hills Have Eyes).
© 2000 Jonathan Marshall
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