OK. One more. I am the only guy in the world who ADORES Windtalkers, so I put it in my top 5, on par with Red Cliff. Finally, I’ve spoken about this forbidden love.

Not a bad listing, Kyle! If I’m being completely objective, I might order them as: 1.) The Killer, 2.) Bullet in the Head, 3.) Hard Boiled, 4.) A Better Tomorrow II, and 5.) hmm, maybe Hard Target or Face/Off. Though I have to admit that Hard Boiled is the one I return to the most, so it feels a little disingenuous to put it at Number 3!

Worthy picks, although with your fondness for JCVD, surprised to see no mention of ‘Hard Target’. You have something against mullets? 😛

Ohhh. Hmm. Let’s see. 1) Hard Boiled 2) The Killer 3) A Better Tomorrow 4) Bullet in the Head and 5) is probably currently Red Cliff. I still love Woo but I’ve not seen many of his films in a long time. So maybe I’m forgetting the greatness of A Better Tomorrow 2, Face/Off, or even Once a Thief, I dunno. But that’s how I’d rank the best today.

Be careful what you wish for. Like many others, I hoped for the day when Chow Yun Fat and Andy Lau would headline a movie together again….then we got ‘From Vegas to Macau III’.

It doesn’t! I guess Fung was smart enough to know that some scenes just can’t be re-created. 😛

& I know this is going off on a tangent, but you have my curiosity – what’s your John Woo Top 5?

Exactly, it you’re going to draw inspiration from John Woo or the ‘Mission: Impossible’ flicks, then you need that “wow!” moment somewhere in the movie. ‘The Adventurers’ is missing that, and feels to some degree that it’s coasting along in (an admittedly pleasant) neutral. While that doesn’t make it a bad movie, it also doesn’t make it a movie to be remembered that long after you’re through watching it.

Like you I’m a fan of ‘Once a Thief’. The fact that its lightweight often seems to get cited as a criticism, but if a movie is supposed to be lightweight, then it seems unfair to hold it against it. The real problem is that everyone wanted it to be another bullet riddled heroic bloodshed movie, and instead they got a breezy caper flick. Expectations are everything.

“palette cleanser” lol Good way to put it.

Speaking which, I remember a few years ago it was being teased that Cherie Chung was going to be making a comeback. I was hoping she and Chow Yun-Fat could do one more movie together, even if it ended up being something as awful as those VEGAS TO MACAU movies. Just to see them on screen together again would be worth it.

I agree with you that John Woo’s ‘Once a Thief’ is horribly underrated, even by some of his most ardent fans. It’s certainly far more lightweight than the majority of Woo’s work, but it has that effortlessly quality of a film made by entertainers who are at the peak of their talent.