Why I Liked... Let The Bullets Fly (2010)

(Dir. Jiang Wen. Starring: Chow Yun-Fat, Feng Xiaogang, Jiang Wen)

I laughed, a lot.

For two Christmases now I’ve been going to the cinema with my darling friend L, and we always make sure to see some of the local fare. Back in 2009 we watched Bodyguards and Assassins, which ended up winning big at the Hong Kong Film Awards. So this year, we had to find a film to live up to it. I found Bullets for us, which we both went into thinking it would be a super serious film with deep and meaningful messages and tears and stuff.

Oh, how we were wrong. So very wrong.
While Bullets did end up becoming a major Hong Kong hit, it was anything but serious. It didn’t take itself seriously, and from the very opening Big Action sequence, I didn’t take it seriously.

Neither did the poster design crew.

Which really, made it the an amazing film-going experience. The jokes were cheesy, fast, borderline inappropriate (which is a lot coming from me), and the visual gags were cheap, and possibly done by someone in their first day of VFX class.

But what more than makes up for shoddy effects was the cast. Oh, the cast, how I love thee.

I’d like to begin how good looking they were by saying: hot damn, they were good looking.

And now, to make me sound a little more credible, allow me to move on. Because its actions were so absurd, I pretty much allowed this film to do whatever the hell it wanted, and get away with it as well.

Set in the warring 1920s, Bullets tells the tale of a group of bandits with a heart of gold and pockets to fill who decide to take on the role of Governor in the corrupt Goose Town unofficially run by the mobster Huang (Chow Yun-Fat). Pocky Zhang (Jiang Wen), the leader of the bandits leads them to living crime-free lives, striving to bring Huang down by legal means only.

Taking the moral high ground, if you will. 

 

Not since 'Luscious Malfoy' have I been tempted to call someone 'well Huang'. Heh.

In a film made anywhere else, Bullets’s blood and gore and violence would seem over done, too much, and comical. In this case, it’s just comical. In one scene, a character, for the sake of his honour, stabs himself in the gut to prove he only ate one bowl of noodles after being accused of trying to get out of paying for two. What results is Jello.

Yes, red Jello comes wibbley wobbling out of his open wound...with only one portion worth of noodles, of course.

And frankly, it doesn’t stop there. I’m not sure how much of it was intentional and how much of it was just bad translation, but I could not stop laughing during the entire film. It was as if someone had re-made the original Ocean’s Eleven with less than half the budget. The eight bandits (all named numbers between 1-8) are relentless in what their leader has set out to accomplish, and what sets this apart from a low-budget Ocean’s Eleven is the fact that these bandits have an actual moral compass, and aren’t stealing just for the sake of ‘sticking it to the man’. 

 

Everybody was bullet fighting...

Frankly, I thoroughly enjoyed this quirky, off-beat film. It’s completely different (and rightly so) from so much of the regular fare I end up watching, and the fact that it’s somehow also become a darling at the Hong Kong Film Awards (no wins, however) is a nice way of continuing my Quality Hong Kong Cinema Streak from 2010 to 2011. 

 

Let’s hope there’s another hidden gem come 2012.