I tend to think movies that are billed as "a film by" some famous director as dubious propositions. Also, movies that do really well on the independent film circuit, but don't make any money can also be the sort of thing that you have to be an empty-headed film critic to like. But I've generally had good luck with Johnnie To movies. Fulltime Killer, Triad Election, Sparrow, PTU, were all good. So I was prepared to like Vengeance.
Vengeance is definitely a bit more art-house than some of his other movies I've seen, but it still delivers pretty good action (in a Hong Kong vein) and a fairly reasonable plot. Simon Yam and Anthony Wong are both excellent, per usual and I thought Johnny Hallyday (who is apparently a French film icon) wasn't bad either. Very minor spoilers after the jump.
This, I think, is a movie that is more rewarding if you don't know much of the plot before you see it. The set up, which is at the very beginning so I'm not spoiling much, is that Costello's (Hallyday) daughter is married to a Chinese man and lives in Macau. Three hitmen break in and (seemingly) kill the entire family. When Costello arrives in Macau, we find out that his daughter has survived and he swears vengeance on her attackers and murderers of her family.
The problem, of course, is that Costello speaks no Chinese and has no idea of his way around the city. By coincidence, he sees three hitmen leaving a hotel room on his floor of the hotel and realizes what they are. They see him, but decide against killing him. This appears to be a mistake on their part when one of them is hailed into a line-up for Costello to identify, but he deliberately feigns ignorance and then follows the man until he has an opportunity to speak to him and his colleagues. Whereupon he hires them to help in his quest for revenge and the movie is off and running.
There are a couple good twists later, some are obvious and some are not, but they work pretty well. There really aren't any good guys, just bad guys we like better than the others and that we're supposed to sympathize with and cheer for. I'm more sensitive to this trope than I used to be and I wasn't entirely satisfied. I spent most of the movie with a vague sense of discontent. The end also isn't entirely satisfying, regardless of your sympathies end up, I think. But it is, at the same time, a suitable ending. A story like this could hardly end perfectly well.
On the whole, I think this was a good movie, though not one I need to run out and buy so I can watch it over and over. It's pretty good as an action movie and better as a musing on the nature of honour and revenge. It's worth watching. There is a fair bit of violence (as you should expect with the description above), and one scene where a hit takes place on an adulterous couple in the middle of their coupling. I watch foreign films with subtitles, and the language tends to be less obtrusive that way, but there is still the standard amount of four-letter words too, I'd say.
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