Bullet in the Head

John Woo’s The Good The Bad and The Ugly. Or Apocalypse Now. Or his Once Upon a Time in Saigon if you like. 

Couple of thoughts. 

You know how that gun fight at the end of Scarface is the greatest thing you have ever seen? Woo does like three or four of those per movie. At least he did when he was on his near 30 year hot streak that began in 1986 in Hong Kong. 

This one was on my list for a long time but I could only watch it now that Woo and the films of his Hong Kong contemporaries have been rereleased in America. 

You can see all of them and more great stuff on the streamers. Don’t miss out. 

I didn’t think much of the first hour but everything from the POW sequence onward is some of the most insane moviemaking you have ever seen. 

Even the story, usually Woo’s weakest work (for me at least), got to me towards the end. Or at least it wound up getting somewhere I cared about after too much dithering with side characters and storylines. 

It definitely hurts that Chow Yun Fat did not choose to be in this. You will recognize which character he was supposed to play immediately after he shows up. It’s not subtle. But there is a reason why Chow Yun Fat was the man and lots of other people never got there. 

Finally, if you ever see an explosion go off near someone in a John Woo picture and wondered, how did he make it look so real? The answer is that it was a real explosion that was probably set off way too close to a real actor or their stunt double. 

And there are a lot of guys out there with the scars to prove it.