Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

leonblackwood Review: I really enjoyed this epic movie! It's full of intense action/drama and the performances from the three childhood friends were great. The movie is set in Hong Kong, 1967, were best friends Ben (Tony Leung), Paul (Waise Lee) and Frank (Jacky Leung), brawl with rival gangs, to gain respect. During Ben's marriage to his long time girlfriend Jane, Frank takes out a loan, so he can pay for the reception but he is attacked by a rival gang, who attempt to take his money. Frank manages to escape with a severe cut to his head and the money he borrowed but everyone at the wedding can see that there is something wrong with him. After the wedding Frank tells Ben about the fight with the rival gang and they head out for revenge. Frank ends up killing the leader of the gang, which puts both of there life's in danger. They then tell Paul about the fight and they decide to leave Hong Kong and head for Vietnam because they heard of a smuggling scam which could make them some money. As soon as they reach Vietnam, there cases with the contraband are destroyed because a suicide bomber attempts to kill a highly ranked officer of the army. After being wrongly accused of the bombing, they meet up with Luke (Simon Yam), to discuss the missing contraband and they soon become friends and meet his boss Leong. Whilst in his club, Frank bumps into an attractive singer, Sally, who agrees to meet him the following day. She then tells him about her love for Luke and how they planned to escape Vietnam but there plan was cut short when Leong's henchmen caught them in the act. Now that Luke is forced to work for Leong and Sally is forced into prostitution and drugs, they put together a plan to kill Leong and escape Vietnam forever. During a big shootout in Leong's club, Paul comes across a suitcase of gold, which is the only thing that he is interested in but the rest of them are fighting to get Sally to safety. During the shootout, Sally gets shot, so they have to try and keep her alive whilst trying to get there escape point. After a long battle with the army and Leong's henchmen, Sally dies and they are captured by the Vietcong and taken to a concentration camp. The Vietcong take the gold and find intelligence documents that Leong was going to sell to the North Vietnamese. After a brutal interrogation, Paul claims to be working for the CIA to save his friends. Frank is then forced to kill other prisoners and then Ben takes over and turns the gun on the officers that have captured them. Whilst escaping, Luke arrives with a elite squad and Paul goes into hiding with the gold. Paul finds Frank and urges him to be quiet so they don't get caught but Frank has become to distraught and he can't keep his mouth shut. Paul then shoots Frank in the back of the head and then he flees with the gold. When Luke finds Frank, he puts him on a rescue helicopter while Ben chases Paul, who destroys a peaceful village for no apparent reason. When Ben tries to save one of the villagers, Paul shoots him and escapes on a boat. Ben is then saved by some monks and eventually makes his way back to Saigon were he bumps into Luke, who has suffered some injuries to his face during the whole rescue attempt. Luke then takes him to Frank, who has severe head injuries and become addicted to heroin due to his injuries caused by Paul. Ben tries his utmost to get sense out of Frank but he has gone to a dark place and has completely lost control of his mind, so Ben puts him out of his misery. Luke then decides to stay in Saigon and Ben returns home to his wife, who has given birth to there child. After everything that had happened in Vietnam, Paul has become a successful businessman who is due a promotion. When Ben turns up at his workplace with Frank's skull, he confronts him about his actions in Saigon but Paul doesn't want to hear any of it. He then waits for him to finish work and they go head to head in a epic car chase. After destroying there cars, they finally come face to face with each other and Ben fights to redeem Frank's name. This must be the longest review I have ever typed! There is just so much going on in this film and I don't think that I would be doing it any justice if I covered it in a few words. It's a very detailed storyline which has every element covered. Like many John Woo movies, the gun action is great and the chemistry between Ben, Frank, Paul and there new found friend Luke, who I personally thought was the best character, was also great. The intensity is brilliant throughout and the cinematography made the film seem authentic and real. I would have liked to have seen what happened to Ben and Luke but that just me being picky. Enjoyable!Round-Up: This is another great achievement by John Woo, 69, who made this movie 3 years before he went to Hollywood and made the awful Hard Target with Jean Claude Van Damme. He did bounce back with Face/Off and Mission Impossible III but like Jackie Chan, he decided to turn his back on Hollywood and go back to making movies for the Oriental market. I personally hope that he gets a massive budget to make a epic movie for a worldwide audience, before he decides to stop making movies because he has a unique style of telling any story with detail and emotion.I recommend this movie to people who are into their action/crime/drama's starring Tony Leung, Jacky Cheung, Waise Lee and Simon Yam. 8/10

Spikeopath Die xue jie tou (AKA: Bullet in the Head) is directed, co-written, co-edited and produced by John Woo. It stars Tony Leung, Jacky Cheung, Waise Lee and Simon Yam.1967 and three Hong Kong friends leave behind a violent incident and aim to earn their fortune in war-time Saigon. Getting mixed up in the war because of their criminal activities, the friends encounter the Viet Cong and it sets off a chain of events that will change and shatter their hopes, dreams and lives forever.It was originally planned to be a prequel to A Better Tomorrow, but with Woo falling out with producer Tsui Hark, he decided to rework the script into what is now Bullet in the Head. Taking inspiration from the Tiananmen Square incident, and no doubt nodding appreciatively in the direction of The Deer Hunter, Woo self financed the film and set about creating an epic. Which he did, an apparently 3 hour + epic that was promptly ordered to be sliced down into something more compact. What that means is there are a number of different cuts of the film available, depending how far you wish to pursue a cut that is. On release it flopped in its native country, but as Hong Kong cinema became popular in America and Europe, the film has garnered much critical praise, with some critics even proclaiming it the best Hong Kong movie ever made.It's a deeply affecting movie, one that contains all the bullets and violent carnage so befitting its creator. And it finds the director at his most personal, most political and dealing high in morality. One can guess that the original cut would have been a near masterpiece of cohesion and emotional fortitude, as it stands now, it plays like two halves shunted together without any care for flow and substance. The first half plays out like a Woo gangster piece, characters are introduced, formed and get involved in bloodshed. Then it's on to Vietnam and the film starts to follow a distressing course, before we come full circle and Woo gets his sledgehammer back out to close with a bone crunching thud. The action is superb, an assault on the eyes and the ears, with the cast providing an energy that's a joy to behold. While the emotional threads that Woo pulls at really are upsetting and hold the attention in a vice like grip. At times visceral and uncompromising, at others tender and panging the heart, it's very much a film operating on more than one front. But with that comes moments of alienation and snatches of incoherence, and that brings on the onset of frustration. The end result being a film that's essential for Honk Kong connoisseurs, but difficult to recommend to first timers looking for a Honk Kong starting point.Ambitious, lively and emotionally sharp, it however isn't quite a satisfying whole. 7/10

Tweekums I only bought this because it was part of "The John Woo Collection" and having watched it I'm glad that I bought it as it is a good film although it isn't as good as "The Killer" or "Hard Boiled". The action doesn't stop from the beginning to the end. I was expecting it to be a war film as it is mostly set in Vietnam during the war however it is really an action film that happens to be set during a war.Three friends decide to flee from Hong Kong when the police are after them for the killing of a local gang leader. They decide to head to Saigon believing they will be able to make a quick buck selling items they brought with them on the black market. Unfortunately for them their items are destroyed when a bomber blows up the taxi they were in during an attack on a high ranking ARVN officer. After witnessing the summary execution of the bomber they realise what they need to make money in Saigon is a gun. They soon meet up with their contact and acquire guns, with these they steal a crate of gold from a local gangster, in the process they rescue a singer who gets wounded in the escape. Their escape plan does not go as well as planned and they find themselves prisoners of the NVA. I've tried to keep the spoilers to a minimum so as not to spoil the story for those who have yet to see it.As one would expect from a John Woo film there is plenty of action, in fact there is hardly a scene that doesn't involve fighting or shooting. The action looks good if a little unbelievable; our pistol carrying friends seem to be able to beat machine-gun carrying ARVN and NVA soldiers along with a hoard of gangsters. I'd recommend this to anybody who likes action films or is interested in seeing a Vietnam movie that isn't centred on the Americans.

ExpendableMan If you've never seen a John Woo movie before, you're in for one hell of a surprise about forty minutes into Bullet in the Head. Up until this point, there has been violence in the film but it has mostly been restricted to street level brawling, clashes between armed police and war protesters in Saigon and punch ups in Hong Kong slums. Then at the height of an argument in a Triad owned nightclub, things get turned up to eleven as Waise Lee pulls a machine gun from out of a piano and massacres an entire room full of gangsters in one breathtaking swoop. After this, things barely let up as Woo mixes in harrowing prison camp madness with over the top gun battles. If this implies that Bullet in the Head has no heart however then nothing could be further from the truth; not only is this an incredibly violent movie, it might also be Woo's most emotional.Stamped over everything is in the indelible trace of the Tiananmen square massacre, which might explain the film's poor showing in Hong Kong, where it played to the people who faced it first hand far too soon for them to embrace it. Over fifteen years later though, Bullet In The Head could do with a reappraisal so that it might stand on its own two feet, rather than simply being viewed as an Eastern alternative to The Deer Hunter or Apocalypse Now.The Eastern setting though provides a fresh spin on the Vietnam war which had already been captured on camera by an America eager to exorcise the ghosts of the war. The story of three ghetto youths (Waise Lee, Jackie Cheung and future superstar Tony Leung) forced to flee Hong Kong, it captures them in their early days before sending them to Saigon, where the trio intend to take advantage of the war and make a fortune. Needless to say, things do not go entirely as planned and they have to flee once more with a box filled with gold they have captured from a local kingpin. Unfortunately for them, there is nowhere to run but into the Vietcong-infected jungle...For the first time, the true scale of the war is made readily apparent. In the East, it is sometimes known as The Second Indochina War as the conflict didn't restrict itself to Vietnam itself, spilling over into neighbouring Cambodia and Laos and affecting everyday citizens of countries who weren't even involved. Woo's vision of the 1960's Far East is one of unprecedented chaos triggered by the clash of Capitalist and Communist ideologies, where suicide bombs are detonated in traffic jams and citizens plucked from the street to have their heads blown off by overzealous military police. It's an uncompromising vision and no mistake.All of this is told from the eyes of our heroic trio and the effects of the war leave an impression on all of them. Their friendship is tested to the limit and watching it dissolving, counter-cut with earlier moments when they were smiling, happy youngsters is nigh on heartbreaking. Corny yes, but still heartbreaking.However, for those of you have seen a John Woo film before and want action on an unprecedented scale, well look no further. The aforementioned nightclub battle is just an impressive iceberg tip, as Woo hurtles the characters from one set piece to the next with a riotous enthusiasm. A riverside gun fight keeps things moving, followed by skirmishes in the jungle and a breath taking helicopter assault on a Vietcong camp, bullets flying in all directions as fireballs bloom upwards and bodies contort in slow motion death rattles. Provided you've got the unedited version, you'll also see a climactic car duel that is better than anything he has done since moving to the States.Action junkies then will be well sated but what about the rest of us who want bold, creative film making that doesn't have to rely on helicopter explosions to make a point? Well, Bullet in the Head delivers four career defining performances from the leads, a cathartic and emotional script, a harrowing impression of a world with a collapsing social order and a stark political message on the worries of Hong Kong citizens regarding their fate in the 1997 handover. All that's missing is a love story...oh wait, there's one at the beginning. Admittedly, sometimes it is a bit too violent for its own good and Woo could have eased off the throttle to let it breathe a bit, but this is still a film worth catching and a career high point for the auteur.