Running Out of Time (1999) is another brilliant film by Johnny To (whom I’ve written about before). A man with just a few weeks left to live (Andy Lau) plans and executes an elaborate robbery/scam, motivated ultimately by honor and revenge, the need to settle scores with the gang leader who betrayed his father. In the course of events he develops a kind of emotional bond with the cop who is trying to catch him (Ching Wan Lau).
The themes might seem familiar from John Woo, but this is a very different sort of film. To’s fractured action editing and oblique lighting, together with the way he has of inserting odd digressions into the plot without slackening the pace, create a kind of jittery poetry, both frenetic and cool, never quite settling down into any sort of fixed and recognizable sentiment (I think this is yet another example of what Jenny calls “emotionless affect”).
This sort of not-quite-feeling is a quality of To’s elaborate visual style; but it’s also perfectly embodied in Andy Lau’s charismatic outlaw, charming us even at the point of death. Knowing that he will be gone soon, periodically spitting up blood, he seems detached from his own ferocious desires, machinating his plot with an insouciance worthy of Cary Grant. Indeed, the way an insistent consciousness of mortality somehow comes across as insouciance is a big part of what makes the film work for me: such a connection or transformation seems utterly outrageous, yet at the same time it seems so perfectly right. The prospect of death is a source of dread and mystery, perhaps, only because death itself is so shallow; there’s nothing behind the curtain.
I don’t mean to say that Running Out of Time is a philosophical film: it’s too committed to the thrills of the action genre to have any such pretensions. (It also has some of the attributes of a video game). But To’s images, and Lau’s performance, nonetheless do embody a kind of thought. And a new thought at that. A thought that could only be thought in our age of globalization, of multiplying images, and of the ubiquitous electronic extrusion of our brains. Not profound thought, but lateral thought, networked thought, thought that is visceral yet superficial, skidding across the surfaces of our eyes and ears and minds.
Running Out of Time
Running Out of Time (1999) is another brilliant film by Johnny To (whom I’ve written about before). A man with just a few weeks left to live (Andy Lau) plans and executes an elaborate robbery/scam, motivated ultimately by honor and revenge, the need to settle scores with the gang leader who betrayed his father. In the course of events he develops a kind of emotional bond with the cop who is trying to catch him (Ching Wan Lau).
The themes might seem familiar from John Woo, but this is a very different sort of film. To’s fractured action editing and oblique lighting, together with the way he has of inserting odd digressions into the plot without slackening the pace, create a kind of jittery poetry, both frenetic and cool, never quite settling down into any sort of fixed and recognizable sentiment (I think this is yet another example of what Jenny calls “emotionless affect”).
This sort of not-quite-feeling is a quality of To’s elaborate visual style; but it’s also perfectly embodied in Andy Lau’s charismatic outlaw, charming us even at the point of death. Knowing that he will be gone soon, periodically spitting up blood, he seems detached from his own ferocious desires, machinating his plot with an insouciance worthy of Cary Grant. Indeed, the way an insistent consciousness of mortality somehow comes across as insouciance is a big part of what makes the film work for me: such a connection or transformation seems utterly outrageous, yet at the same time it seems so perfectly right. The prospect of death is a source of dread and mystery, perhaps, only because death itself is so shallow; there’s nothing behind the curtain.
I don’t mean to say that Running Out of Time is a philosophical film: it’s too committed to the thrills of the action genre to have any such pretensions. (It also has some of the attributes of a video game). But To’s images, and Lau’s performance, nonetheless do embody a kind of thought. And a new thought at that. A thought that could only be thought in our age of globalization, of multiplying images, and of the ubiquitous electronic extrusion of our brains. Not profound thought, but lateral thought, networked thought, thought that is visceral yet superficial, skidding across the surfaces of our eyes and ears and minds.