Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
It’s not like John Woo ever really lost it.
Sure, his somewhat-misbegotten time in Hollywood fizzled out with limp efforts like Paycheck and Windtalkers, but since returning to Asian cinema, Woo has been at the helm of widely-acclaimed historical epics like Red Cliff. Unlike many masters who keep trying to recreate their former magic long after their prime, Woo didn’t so much miss a step as shift into a new, distinctive phase in his style and career. While different from his earlier work, it was nevertheless every bit as accomplished.
But even so, it was easy to miss the wild days of Hard Boiled, The Killer, or even the banana bonanzas like Hard Target and Face/Off. For fans of that particular brand of John Woo, this year’s Manhunt arrived like a luminescent dove flying in slow motion through a gunfight.
Adapted from a Japanese novel and film, Manhunt is the story of Du Qiu (Zhang Hanyu) a Chinese-born lawyer living in Japan, wealthy and pampered thanks to his career representing a major pharmaceutical company. But Du Qiu’s life is thrown into a chaos when he wakes up bleary one morning after a party and discovers a dead woman in his bed. Du Qiu goes on the run, doggedly pursued by cocksure cop Detective Satoshi Yamura (Masaharu Fukuyama).
But these two seeming enemies will need to see past their differences if they intend to unravel the conspiracy around Du Qiu’s throat, and survive the onslaught of assassins that are hot on their trail (including Ha Ji-won and Woo’s daughter, Angeles Woo, as a team of hitwomen).
So, was this a return to form for the original maestro of balletic gun battles, or is Woo stuck playing overly-familiar hits?
Next Week’s Pick:
It’s hard to believe that Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a decade old, but there was indeed a time when Jason Segel, Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, and Russell Brand were considered unknown quantities on the big screen.
FSM sprang into public awareness thanks to the infamous opening scene where Bell’s Sarah Marshall dumps Segel while he is clad only in his birthday suit, a flaccid full-court press for attention that worked like gangbusters. But ten years on, are there still laughs to be had in this Apatow-produced concoction?
Forgetting Sarah Marshall is available to stream on Netflix Instant.
Would you like to be a guest in next week’s Two Cents column? Simply watch and send your under-200-word review on any MCU film to twocents(at)cinapse.co anytime before midnight on Thursday!
Our Guests
Ryan Bisasky:
Manhunt does at times play like John Woo’s greatest hits but unlike a lot of older directors when they go back to their roots, it never feels forced. Sure the story is a bit overly complicated , and when the characters speak English, it comes off as stiff and or broken, as if they don’t know the language & have to go with cue cards or learning it phonetically. The same thing also happens in Shin Godzilla. This is a very entertaining flick and gives me hope for Woo’s upcoming The Killer remake. Also keep an eye out for the doves! (@TheChewDefense)
Brendan Agnew (The Norman Nerd):
Hot damn, but I missed this John Woo.
Not to say that Woo’s been off the edge of the map the past decade — the full 4+ hour international of his Three Kingdoms epic Red Cliff is a masterpiece — but it really is a damn shame that we haven’t had a good old fashioned Heroic Bloodshed romp from him in so long. Which is why I approached Manhunt with as much trepidation as excitement, but was overjoyed to discover that the granddaddy of gun-fu action melodrama still very much has the goods. Woo’s latest starts off like The Fugitive stumbled into a “lady assassins” conspiracy thriller, evolves into a buddy cop film, and by the end has flown right off the rails into full comic book/video game movie territory — complete with a Final Boss.
And. It. RULES.
The digital photography may rob the proceedings of some of the tactile grit that imbued The Killer and Hard Boiled with such satisfactory tangibility, and no one here quite matches the legendary swagger of Chow Yun-Fat, but the leading men have legit chemistry, the set pieces still sing (there’s one in a farm house that packs in as many awesome gags as the finale of most action films), the ladies get to be way more involved in the proceedings this time around (and they *crush it*, particularly Angeles Woo), and the master delivers arguably his two best riffs on his signature dove gag in the space of 10 seconds.
The John Wicks of the world have been doing a fine job of carrying the banner recently, but there really is no substitute. Woo still not only has the action chops, but a mix of earnest theatricality and wistful melancholy that is still uniquely his own, even after decades of influencing the genre. And it’s good to see him prove it. (@BLCAgnew)
The Team
It’s impossible to quantify the purity of my joy as a brand new heroic bloodshed film from John Woo played out before my eyes on a streaming service in my home. I came in with hesitance based on the long gap since a truly great Woo film (Red Cliff was good but I don’t remember much beyond that). But that made the creeping smile across my face feel all the sweeter as I found myself adoring Manhunt. I guess I understand those who don’t like it. It feels like a time machine back to the early 1990s and Woo uses all his same signature moves. I theorize, however, that many who claim to love Woo don’t quite remember the depth of the melodrama and silliness that comes with even his most classic and highly regarded ’80s and ’90s films. He’s full Woo here, with soapy melodrama and SPRY action set pieces that absolutely recapture the magic of Woo’s heyday. Doves, motorcycles, cheesy jazz, cheesier dialog, freeze frames, and glorious balletic handgun violence are all in full display here at the hands of an undisputed master having all the fun I could ever ask for. (@Ed_Travis)
I have one complaint, and one complaint only. As the other Brendan noted, the digital photography robs the film of the sort of grit and texture that were a hugely important factor in why the gunfights in Hard Boiled and The Killer worked so well. Without that Manhunt often looks somewhat cheap, like a talented DTV director taking homage from John Woo films, rather than a full-blooded new entry from the master himself.
And that really is too bad because in pretty much every other respect, Manhunt is a delight. Woo does not possess an ironic bone in his body, and so while it would have been easy for this to be a cynical replication of his early hits, or a winking self-parody that lol’d at its own excess and melodrama, Woo and his cast commit to the madness. You’re goddamn right there are going to be doves, and the way Woo uses them in this picture made me want to stand up and cheer.
The narrative starts off keyed to Hitchcockian paranoia, but soon Woo has shifted tones and we enter Hard Boiled-land, and by the last act the whole enterprise has launched into the kind of loopy live-action cartoon territory of a Face/Off. It works in large part because Woo’s leading men are both charismatic and bounce well off each other as rivals/reluctant partners/soul mates, and because the whole thing is such a daffy good time you’d have to be at least kind of an asshole not to get a kick out of the crazy turns and amped up action (no offense to anyone this week who didn’t like it). So, yeah, I’d say Manhunt gets a thumbs up from me.(@theTrueBrendanF)
Trailer:
Watch it on Netflix:
https://www.netflix.com/title/80209866
Next week’s pick: