mikenike8835 This movie soared above my expectations. After reading a review I was expecting a mediocre story with good action scenes. Well, I was definitely wrong about one thing. The story was great and very heartfelt by the end of the movie. The action scenes glorify gun fights making them look really cool. There were certain scenes that tricked me into thinking gun fights were fun and something I should be apart of. I snapped back to reality of course. Let me put it this way, if you can stream netflix then you can watch this movie right now. So if you can stream netflix my question is this. Why are you still reading this review instead of watching this amazing movie?

lastliberal Johnnie To has 50 films under his belt and is becoming a peer of John Woo with his stylized flicks that contain smoking action and great choreography with magnificent sound.On has to wonder how these people ever got jobs as hit men. They couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. It's just as well, because with all the shooting, it would be over far too quickly.It is amazing how they manage to have a gun fight and then sit down to dinner like nothing happened, and then say that they have to kill Wo (Nick Cheung), but agree to do it at his convenience. Well, they are childhood friends, but orders have to be obeyed, they just don't have to be obeyed right at the moment.What a finale!

frankenbenz Mainstream Asian cinema owes as much to Hollywood as mainstream cinema anywhere in the world. Hollywood perfected cinematic storytelling in the 30's and 40's and its influence is still present in practically everything we watch. The transition from Hong Kong to Hollywood has elevated (or destroyed, depending who you ask) the careers of many directors and actors: Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, John Woo and Tsui Hark to name a few. To his credit, one director has avoided the calling of the West and remained in Hong Kong not only to buoy HK cinema, but also to redefine himself as perhaps the most interesting of all mainstream Asian filmmakers.Johnny To may be the only HK filmmaker who possibly owes as much to Jean-Luc Godard as he does to Hollywood. As such, the similarities between To's films and Tarantino's are impossible to disregard and, like Tarantino, To elevates the tired clichés and conventions of genre pics (the same traits John Woo is (sac)religiously married to) into revisionist works of art. But To's influences don't begin and end with Godard and Exiled hammers this home since it is crammed full of references to Leone's famous Spaghetti Westerns and also to the classic John Ford Westerns that made John Wayne a household name. Make no mistake about it, Exiled is a Western and even though it masquerades as a HK triad shoot em' up, every single detail on the screen is cherry picked from Westerns.Exiled is a good example of how a film can, at first, smack of familiarity before taking off on a fresh, uncharted flight of fiction. Despite a few clunky sequences and some thin writing, Exiled will not only be hailed by To fans as one of his best films, it will also find converts thanks to its Triad trimmings (and those in search of a post-modern Western).In Exiled, the premise of a typical gangland hit evolves into a blossoming character study of five friends whose pasts unfold in increments alongside the growing chaos of present circumstances. While gun play cracks throughout, To's style is nothing like Woo's, where, instead of making the action the proud centerpiece, To uses it sparingly as an infrequent catalyst to propel our protagonists story arc from one escalating situation to the next. That's not to say the action isn't palpable, but the action is merely a flash of style that's deliberately trumped by the predominant substance throughout. Exiled makes a strong case that if John Woo were to permanently abandon the West for his homeland, he'd have some catching up to do with the current king of Kong.http://eattheblinds.blogspot.com/

moimoichan6 If "Exiled" could at first appears as a cold style exercise that focuses itself on the mathematical numbers of five and two, the movie is at the end one (if not the) best Johnny To's movie, and carries within a incredible felling of freedom and melancholia. I think that with this movie, Johnny To archive to reach the level of the best of his older masters, like John Woo or Tsui Hark.FIVE : That's around this number that the all movie seems to be build. "Exiled" tells the story of five men against the world, in five parts (that means five gigantic gunfights). But the logical of the number five is broken by one of the member of this gang of five : Wo, who left them years ago. The movie stars when he comes back to Macao, where his four old friends, his wife and his baby, are waiting for him. But the unity is already lost : when they met again, two wants to kill him, and two wants to protect him. There's no wonder why this breaker of symmetry rapidly died, when he refuses to bend over the mathematical beauty of the movie. The former gang will indeed try to find a fifth member (it will be a moral mercenary), but they'll be only four to finish their road. Anyway, the movie isn't rationally build on the number five, but rapidly chooses errancy and coincidences to makes its way. That's the way the gang also fallows when he lets a coin game chooses its path. It's then in in number two, like the two faces of a coin, that the movie will find its unity. TWO : With the use of that coin, the exiled of the movie takes the face of the duality. The gunfights, if you watch them carefully, are also duels (even with multiple characters and combinations). The number two is indeed at the beginning of Johnny To's project, witch is to combine the codes of a classical Hongkongue polar (with it's killers with sunglasses and ethical from another time, its alway on the move camera, that shoots the killings like musical ballets, etc.) with the ones of 60's European westerns (...Per Qualche Dollari in piu is directly quoted, the atmosphere of the movie reminds the Peckinpah's ones, the OST is a pastiche of Moricone, etc.). It's like the movie itself is a cultural translation of Macao, the Chinese island where the movie occurs, and that has been a Portuguese colony for years. In that original mixture, the movie reminds me of "Cowboy Bebop" (an anime that also mixes Asian culture and occidental western in order to creates feeling of nostalgia and freedom) or of a reverse "Kill Bill".But this cultural duality is like an echo of the personal style of Johnny To, that always breaks his beautiful gunfights with lighter and melancholic scenes. This fusion and complementarity of the style with its subject creates a great movie, full of freedom, that becomes magnificent in its last killing, beautifully seen through the eyes of a can of Red Bull.