I reviewed Johnnie To’s The Mission Cine-File Chicago. It screens Doc Films on 35mm this Tuesday.

Johnnie To’s THE MISSION (Hong Kong Revival)Doc Films (University of Chicago) — Tuesday, 7pm
Hong Kong’s Johnnie To arguably has been the world’s greatest director of genre films for the past quarter of a century and 1999’s THE MISSION, the coolest gangster movie since the heyday of Jean-Pierre Melville, is an ideal entry point into his prolific filmography for the uninitiated. After an attempt is made on the life of triad boss Brother Lung (Eddy Ko), he hires five professional killers (a who’s who of Hong Kong’s best male character actors of the ’90s: Roy Cheung, Jackie Lui, Francis Ng, Lam Suet, and Anthony Wong) to serve as his personal bodyguards while also trying to unravel the mystery of who ordered the hit. Plot, however, takes a major back seat to character development as scene after scene depicts our quintet of heroes simply bonding and playing practical jokes on one other (a personal highlight is the brilliantly shot and edited office-set sequence where the five co-leads engage in an impromptu paper-ball soccer match). When the action does come, as in a spectacular shopping-mall shootout, it arrives in minimalist, tableaux-like images of meticulously posed characters whose staccato gunfire disrupts the silence, stillness, and monochromatic blue color scheme on which the entire film is based. The quirky synthesizer score only adds to the fun. (1999, 89 min, 35mm) MGS
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More info at www.docfilms.uchicago.edu.