The Cinematheque

“Bullet in the Head is Woo’s single greatest work … In this fallen world, the values that Woo extols [of] loyalty and charity are betrayed.”

Nick Pinkerton, Little White Lies

John Woo’s wildest and weightiest action spectacle is also his most personal movie, one that emerged out of his separation from producer Tsui Hark. The two agreed that the final Better Tomorrow could be set amidst the war in Vietnam. But when it became clear that Woo couldn’t make the film he wanted—a rags-to-riches epic that, like Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, is structured to begin with a wedding and end in mourning—he left the series and told the story with a new cast of to-the-death friends played by Tony Leung, Jacky Cheung, and Waise Lee. Nothing else in Woo’s career compares with the exuberance and emotionality of Bullet in the Head​’s opening sequences of brawls, romances, and turf wars. But the dreamy, propulsive plot (and its existential nods to Scorsese and Nicholas Ray) soon gives way to a nightmare Vietnam, which echoes the opportunism and violence of not just the war (including, specifically, Eddie Adams’s Saigon Execution), but the 1967 Hong Kong riots and Tiananmen Square.

In Cantonese, Vietnamese, English, and French with English subtitles

“While all of Woo’s Hong Kong action films are melodramatic, none of them foreground the melodrama [like] Bullet in the Head; the film’s distinctive blend of soapy plotting, choreographed violence, and expressionist colour verges on the hallucinatory.”

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Cine-File