Vengeance

In 2008, French producers introduced Johnny To, one of Hong Kong's leading action movie directors, to ageing French singer-actor Johnny Hallyday. They'd suggested he could replace Alain Delon, who'd backed out of an English-language thriller they'd planned. Within six months, Vengeance was made, and it competed at Cannes the following year.

It didn't win any prize, and it's easy to sense how it could have done if it had been given a script with stronger characterisations and a subtler examination of the nature of vengeance. Hallyday's Frenchman arrives in Macau to identify his murdered Chinese son-in-law and two grandsons, and send his shot-up daughter back to Paris where her father owns a restaurant. It's on the Champs Elysee, he tells the trio of hit men he hires to exterminate the trio that massacred his family, and it'll be part of your reward.

He knows they're professional, because they eliminate their boss's girlfriend and her lover in Hallyday's hotel. They soon realise he's a retired hit man when they discuss guns. They bond, in simple English, and Hallyday and the three Hong Kong actors (ever-reliable Anthony Wong, Gordon Lam and Lam Suet) succeed via facial expressions and body language in making the new partnership credible. The trio's regular boss is played (to the maniacally grinning hilt) by another ever-present Hong Kong lead actor, Simon Yam, and it's inevitable that the other gang will also have been working for him, ensuring To can set up wild gun battles on waste ground.

There are many magical To-style directorial moments to savour: a street of umbrellas in the rain, a pitched battle fought with huge cubes of scrap metal, flickering red neon lights, sunset on a beach, a bright red dress in Macau's city centre, shadowy alleyways and staircases. The actors could have carried an even richer plot, but the script seems to run out of energy.

In Leconte's truly rich The Man on the Train, Hallyday's character was a tired old bank robber happy to swap lives with a dying poetry teacher. This time, Hallyday (looking very lined and much older than his then 65) is a man losing his memory, reliant on Polaroid snaps to remind himself what his dead family and hired South China gangsters look like. What is revenge, he asks his gang, and it's already obvious by then that the movie won't try to give us answers. At the end, Hallyday laughs: he has seen happiness, and one wonders if he remembers that he has a daughter recuperating in Paris. At the beginning, she was the one demanding revenge.