Johnnie To's The Big Heat is a bleak, unforgiving police thriller that fits nicely within the specific epoch of Hong Kong cinema where morally ambiguous storylines of cops and criminals are primarily used as allegorical devices to comment on the unfettered greed and its impact on the social and political institutions of Hong Kong. Only To's third feature, and his first cop drama, The Big Heat shows flashes of the masterful stylist the director would become yet Tsui Hark's fingerprints are all over this as well, making the directorial authorship nearly indiscernible. Having such a chaotic rhythm and maximalist approach towards violence - the brutality itself rooted in a desire to live solely in the material world - The Big Heat feels like an instrumentally important text in a sense for To as a filmmaker. It's a film very much in the mode of Tsui Hark's frantic style and brutality, which To himself would deconstruct and re-contextualize throughout his crime sagas into poetic existential texts in which the material world feels in service of something larger. With that in mind, one can't help but wonder just how important this film was for Johnnie To as a director. Narratively speaking the film is feels conventional from today's perspective, yet it features some memorable action set-piece, my favorite being a scene between two agents of the state involved in a shoot-out where To uses red and blue-hues to enunciate the film's subtext related to the blurred lines of legality in an increasingly transnational world.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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