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Fulltime Killer review
:. Director: Johnnie To & Wai Ka Fai
:. Starring: Andy Lau, Takashi Sorimachi
:. Running Time: 1:35
:. Year: 2003
:. Country: Hong-Kong
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Immoral but heroic figures, solitary killers have always haunted our screens and our fantasies through their multiple incarnations, from the Parisian jazzy undergound to the plains of the West and feudal Japan. Very early taking the form of a gangster in Hollywood (notably in Howard Hawks' Scarface in 1932), he becomes a myth in Japan as a samurai, particularly thanks to Toshiro Mifune. Europe, strongly influenced by Japanese cinema, then takes over with film noir and the spaghetti western, as Alain Delon, Clint Eastwood and Franco Nero substitute Mifune. It was necessary to wait until the Nineties for a new "revival" of the profession in a glare of violence and black humor with the emergence of John Woo and Quentin Tarantino, representatives of the urban Hong Kong and American movements.
With Fulltime Killer Johnnie To, a specialist of action cinema whose heterogeneous work oscillates between the grotesque (The Heroic Trio) and the minimalist (The Mission), co-directed an exciting homage to a sub-genre, a nervous and flamboyant work where action borders on the mise-en-abîme.
Takashi Sorimachi is O, a discrete killer, number one in his profession. Andy Lau plays Tok, an extravagant assassin who aims at O's crown. Chin (Kelly Lin), a young woman who knows the two men will serve as an involuntary go-between.
Carried by the baroque and explosive style of the two co-directors Johnnie To and Wai Ka Fai, Fulltime Killer multiplies references and winks. A rangy, elegant and silent figure, O is the typically European killer, combining the calculated coldness of Alain Delon (The Samurai) with the effectiveness of Clint Eastwood (in spaghetti westerns). O is an elegant, feline and quiet man who likes to remain in the shadows but is not however stripped of a certain humanity. Tok, on the contrary, is an amateur sadistic assassin of an unbridled violence, a psychopath who transforms killings into meticulous "productions" re-enacting emblematic scenes of such Hollywood films as Terminator 2 and Point Break. Tok is thus the American killer par excellence, an over-the-top and ultra-violent character who owes much to the world of Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez (Desperado, El Mariachi). Based on Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill, this process to associate killers from different "schools" is certainly not new—one also remembers the Delon/Lancaster duo in Scorpio and the Delon/Bronson/Mifune trio in Red Sun—but contrary to Fulltime Killer, these films only favored action.
Between these two polar opposite, Chin officiates like the union of two cinemas, offering a direct allusion to The Professional where French director Luc Besson transposed his European hero into the universe of American action films. But Chin it is also Johnnie To who, like many filmmakers of his generation, openly flirts with European and American cinema. The director also refers to the influence of his peers, in particular Tsui Hark with Time and Tide and John Woo with The Killer .
Alternating low-key moments and high voltage shootings, Fulltime Killer succeeds with its mixture of visual dexterity and second degree as jubilant exercise of style, an action film of a cinephile that doesn't miss its target.
Fred Thom
 Movie Reviews: from 1998 to 2011
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