3/5 stars
In the 9 years since his final characteristic movie, Hong Kong director Wong Ching-po has misplaced none of his affection for visually trendy crime thrillers championing losers and outcasts present on the fringes of society.
The result’s an lively, unwieldy and finally considerably baffling style train prone to perplex audiences as readily because it entertains.
Set in Taiwan, the movie stars Ethan Ruan Ching-tien as Chen Kui-lin, often known as The Kuilin Kid, a infamous hitman accountable for assassinating a high-ranking Taichung gang boss.
We first meet him on the funeral for the aforementioned gangster, the place he openly weapons down one other senior mobster in entrance of a corridor stuffed with underworld mourners. Kui-lin is pursued by cop Chen Hui (Lee Lee-zen), who loses an eye fixed of their scuffle.
Kui-lin escapes and, 4 years later, learns he has terminal stage 4 lung most cancers. He determines to show himself in, however upon discovering that he ranks solely third on Taiwan’s Most Wanted record, the smug hoodlum units off to take out his rivals for the crown of Taiwan’s most infamous prison.
From right here, Wong’s movie has one thing of a broken-back construction, unfolding in two very distinct and tonally totally different components.
The slick swagger of the movie’s first half wields the plain whiff of polished Korean thrillers like Kim Jee-woon’s A Bittersweet Life, as Kui-lin zeroes in on “Hongkie” (Ben Yuen Fu-wah), a vicious gangster working out of a hair salon.
This additionally sees him cross paths with Hsiao-mei (Gingle Wang Ching), a young girl being coerced right into a relationship with the a lot older prison.
The movie’s second half feels nearer in tone to the eccentric works of Japanese filmmaker Sion Sono, as Kui-lin tracks down public enemy primary, “Bullhead” (Chen Yi-wen), a mass assassin who has reinvented himself because the non secular chief of a distant island neighborhood.
Kui-lin should infiltrate the close-knit cult and give up his benefit if he’s to perform his profoundly questionable mission.
For all its aesthetic flamboyance and Ruan’s plain charisma, the character of Kui-lin raises a plethora of unanswered, maybe unanswerable, questions – not least, why is he doing this?
Other characters, notably Hsiao-mei and Chen Hui, are left frustratingly underdeveloped, as Wong asks his viewers merely to strap in and turn into more and more complicit in Kui-lin’s escalating maelstrom of mayhem.
