This film begins with an excellent premise. Our hero has just graduated from high school and is about to marry his sweetheart after four years of savings themselves for each other. During their wedding he interrupts the ceremony to inform everybody that he has a present for each of them. The crowd reaches under their seats to find envelopes containing a picture of the bride in bed with the groom's brother. Our hero then tells the bride to fuck off, walks out of the ceremony and catches the next available flight out of town. That flight takes him to Managua, Nicaragua where drunken escapades with Dutch co-eds ensue alongside muggings and other clashes with the locals. The movie's a whole lot of fun until the main character decides to go on a dangerous, year-long trek through the jungle. It takes forever and it's not very interesting. Also, the ending is stupid.
A timely film about an "autobiography" from a made-up author, this film had potential and manages some good laughs but, ultimately, it never quite cohered into something worth watching. It's got the ideas, just not the execution. Speaking of executioners, this movie is playing as part of the Danger After Dark series and I kept expecting the characters to start getting killed. I wasn't so lucky.
This was my fourth Johnny To film and I've got one more coming up later in the festival. The first one was pretty bad ass but I was a little disappointed by the other two. This one, however, was really great. I've come to the conclusion that To is a craftsman and definitely not an artist. His movies are extremely well made but they lack originality. I'm fine with that as long as he can keep me interested in the story and this one had one of my favorite plots. It's about some really smart cops trying to catch a really smart criminal. Specifically, they're surveillance specialists and the film is all about how to watch someone without being noticed and how to become invisible to those trying to track you down. Also, I love that the film begins with a successful heist where one element was slightly off and that seemingly unimportant element eventually leads the cops to their prey. This is the kind of movie they should show in film school to demonstrate how the genre works.
You'd expect a low-budget viking epic to be pretty cheesy and I think that's how this quite, very realistic, character study caught me off guard. It takes place one thousand years ago when two vikings get left behind after a battle with Native Americans (presumably somewhere in Canada). The two men must survive on their own while attempting to make their way back to their fellow countrymen. The film is (mostly) in Old Norse but there's very little conversation between the warriors. At times it gets a little slow and there's one plot element that seemed a little far fetched to me (but hey, I'm no Viking scholar) but, overall, I really enjoyed it.
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