Released between two of his most famous works, The Killer (1989) and Hard Boiled (1992), action auteur John Woo’s gangster-war epic Bullet in the Head (1990) has long been overlooked. After being conceived as a prequel for A Better Tomorrow (1986), Woo’s creative differences with producer Tsui Hark led him to re-adapt his blood-soaked fraternal tragedy into its own standalone film. Set in 1967 Hong Kong, the film follows three childhood friends—Ah Bee (Tony Leung), Fai Jai (Jacky Cheung), and Little Wing (Waise Lee)— who long to escape their ruffian lifestyle.
A box office failure, the film has recently garnered renewed attention among Western cinephiles with the release of Shout! Factory’s 4K remastered edition earlier this January. Fans of Woo may find the high-octane set pieces in Bullet to be too derivative of its Hollywood references. For admirers of Cantonese heartthrobs Leung and Cheung, the film’s over-the-top performances may be less memorable than those of the more serious dramatic roles the actors would become better known for. In hindsight, the film’s director had his own take on why the film performed so poorly during its original theatrical run. In a 1991 interview with the Chicago Tribune, he explained that domestic audiences probably found Bullet “too heavy, maybe too pessimistic.”
Against the backdrop of brutal police crackdowns on left-wing protests and rampant mob rule throughout the colony, the trio flee their hometown to seek riches in another nexus of chaos: wartime Saigon. Aided by cliched genre archetypes, Simon Yam as a jaded C.I.A hitman and Yolinda Yan as a trafficked pop-star, the gang of three plunge deep into a world of despair. Relentlessly chased down by criminal henchmen, South Vietnamese Military Police, and even the Viet Cong, it becomes clear that the dream of making it big as a trio is unattainable. In the film’s opening montage, the three boys are seen cheekily mucking about to the tune of a theme song that sounds like a honky tonk jazz rock rendition of “Yakety Sax.” By the film’s final act, the baby-faced killers are covered in scars, ready to put a bullet in each other's skulls.
Taking inspiration from the gritty realism of films like The Deer Hunter (1975) and Apocalypse Now (1979), but upping the bloodshed and pyrotechnics to eleven, Woo’s bullet-ridden spectacle is the product of a century-long accumulation of violent images. Though the nightclub shootout clearly pays homage to Scarface (1983) and the whole Vietnam portion is an amalgam of U.S. war flick pastiches, the most potent references made in Bullet are of real-life scenes of carnage. In the streets of Hong Kong, a makeshift bomb blows a bomb squad officer's limbs off as riot cops beat students to a bloody pulp. Composed like Eddie Adams’s infamous 1968 photograph, a suspected Communist partisan in Saigon is executed point blank. Especially influenced by the media coverage of Tiananmen Square from the year prior (a rendition of “Tank Man” makes an appearance at a Vietnamese anti-war demonstration), Woo’s melodramatic bloodbath is a frenzied attempt to make sense of a world on fire.
Bullet in the Head screens this evening, April 30, at Film at Lincoln Center as part of the series “The Grandmaster: Tony Leung.”
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