Exiled

Johnny To is a Hong Kong film auteur who ended up with more commercial success (a la John Woo) than arthouse appreciation (Wong Kar-wai). His production company's name, Milkyway, has become a short-hand way of describing an audience-pleasing distinctive blend of quirky humour, balletic gunfights, vivid colours, and a corps of actors relishing action-thriller roles as sentimental macho (some critics say homo-erotic) gangsters.

Exiled, a 2006 gangland saga set in pre-1999-Handover Macau, has been described as a "Greatest Hits of To" film. It amalgamates standard tricks of his movie-making trade, and those of such regular associates as Szeto Kam-yuen (screenplay), Cheng Siu-keung (cinematography) and David Richardson (editing).

Many of To's favourite actors go through their stylistic motions, well, and the movie's opening tingles with promise and sharp editing. A pair of middle-aged hitmen (grim Anthony Wong and smirking Lam Suet) arrive at a rundown Macau tenement (amid Mediterranean colours beloved by To), and tell a woman (Josie Ho) with a baby they'll wait in the street for her man. Another, younger, pair of triad members (Francis Ng and Roy Cheung) arrive in the street, and the four men acknowledge each other and regret what they must do; it's clear the second pair have appeared to defend the threatened man.

The first pair have been ordered (the audience soon learns) to kill Wo, an exiled Hong Kong gang member (mournful Nick Cheung), who'd failed in his attempt to kill a triad chief (snarling sneering Simon Yam). Wo drives up in a decrepit deep blue van, and so, accidentally, and not for the only mood-lightening moment in the movie, does an undercover police car's comic inspector.

The eventual shoot-out is a typical To work of cinematic art, full of gunshot sounds and furious camera movements, in which none of the five former colleagues dies. The plot then sets up suitably dramatic settings (shadows and curtains, quarry cliffs and pine forests) for other gunplay choreography, with the screenplay providing breathing places in which the gangsters can eat, chat, bond, consider options, and glare or stare at each other.

Like all To movies, this one is made for showing on a big screen to a responsive cinema audience, which expects to be swept through wild coincidences and unnaturally empty streets into long-running pitched battles. One gangster may get wounded, but it'll be clear who it will be: a movie from To is too much of a formulaic cinema experience. Maybe he could have been a Hong Kong Eastwood, and he may believe he's an oriental Sergio Leone making Noodle Westerns.

Exiled is occasionally mesmerising, through pace, lighting effects and set design. At times, when shadows and hues are especially good, one senses the artfulness of Wong Kar-wai's productions, and realises why To eagerly displays his movies in international film festivals and competitions. Exiled was invited to Venice in 2006, and it must be suspected that To and his Milky Way team yearn for more arthouse appreciation. He's won awards a few times in Sitges (for Exiled too) and many times in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but major international appreciation eludes him.