John Woo’s excellent homage to American and French gangster and action film makers, including Scorcese and Peckinpaugh. Based in part on a Japanese Yakuza film, this balletic bit of Hong Kong triad cinema follows the dance between an assassin (Chow Yun Fat) and a cop (Danny Lee) as the former tries to get out of the business with one big score after coming to care for a night club singer he partially blinded during a hit. The killer and the cop share old-school codes of honor and loyalty and identify with one another in many ways. It is, of course, a real slaughterfest, but is also choreographed and filmed with great attention to movement. Often improvised on the set, it begins and ends in the church—Woo is a Christian—a la so many gangster flicks. Not all the principles work, the female lead (Sally Yeh) is weak, but the film is very well done. I saw the Criterion version with many interviews and conversations with Woo and found them very interesting. The dialoge I saw differed. from the dubbing in the original western release