Exiled

Anthony Wong leads a great cast of Hong Kong veterans in Johnnie To's homage to westerns in general and The Wild Bunch in particular. It's a fantastically stylish Triad/Crime thriller that hits all the familiar themes of honor, loyalty and brotherhood and has several nods to Peckinpah's masterpiece throughout. Awesome gun fights and heroic bloodshed.

Basically a western, with a group of renegade gunfighters struggling to retain a sense of honour in a changing world. I liked certain individual parts - the stylized action sequences, the use of music, the more reflective moments in the middle part of the film (reminiscent of Kitano's "Sonatine") - but for me it didn't work as a whole. The plot was too disjointed and more character development was needed.

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first half was GREAT , the other one was ........ stupidity. but i enjoyed it.

Great, really great gangster film. Something about the film touches me in the strangest, almost romantic way.

Terrific.

Viewed October 14, 2020. Purely, aggressively visual; everything recedes in deference to To's movement, pace and sense of orchestrated chaos.

Exiled is a film at odds with itself. On one hand it's a stylish, over the top Hong Kong gangster film, on the other it's a melancholy movie about friendship and the past, but for the most part these two sections compliment each other well. There's a lot of familiarity here right across the board, with a none-too-original plot and a cast of familiar HK crime genre actors, but Exiled does just enough to rise above the glut of HK crime sagas with some good performances around the intricate gunplay

Generic Johnnie To triad flick kinda left me in the dust plot-wise (there were a lot of "wait, who are these guys?" moments), though it has the expected pleasure of balletic bullet-play recorded with silky camera movements. These films might be better served with an opening scrawl, ala Star Wars, or something that gets dim bulbs like me up to speed.

it's a little more conventionally bromantic than his very best work but it may be his most emotionally direct, purely elegiac film, something like a spaghetti western by way of takeshi kitano. so much history is expressed through glance and gesture and posture, and there are those eccentric to touches everywhere: the door spinning in the air, the photo booth, the gang flipping a coin to decide where to go or collecting a friendly cop buddy on the road.

Greatly stylized gun porn that doesn't make any sense appeals to me... Like, when 10+ people manage to shoot/not shoot each other, during the time it takes for a Red Bull (prominently featured throughout) to fall, once thrown in the air. Otherwise, it's somehow pretty atmospheric in its own way whilst blatantly ripping off dozens of westerns and kind of, well, being not too original. Nice camera work and bloodshed always makes my day, though

Star Rating: ★★★

https://letterboxd.com/pickle_man2135/film/exiled/

I'm pretty much okey with cliche ridden stylistic action extravaganza. If -To- has at least kept the basic plot or characters intact to some degree I would have bought it. Thinking that Exiled is submitted for oscars as the best foreign language film it seems like a joke.

Brilliant ballet of faces, bullets, guns and movements, in the kind of action movie that takes filmmaking seriously to the point of being condemned as style over substance -- actually, that's why it's so good.

Johnny To cranks up the stylized violence to 99 but also includes the most ridiculous movie cliches ever. The entire movie is a pretty obvious homage to spaghetti westerns so the implausible action is excusable because of this. However the acting is so hammy at times that it's hard to ignore. You have various Hong Kong action luminaries mugging for the camera at every opportunity and there is even blatant Red Bull product placement.

Proof positive that the Mexican Standoff doesn't necessarily belong to Mexico, Italy, or the American West. The film begins with a bang, but seems to lose steam about halfway through (probably because the added sentimentality doesn't jive well with the tone established by everything else). Despite its flaws, the excellent camerawork and commitment to style makes this a keeper.

Decidedly more cliched than it should be, but very well-executed atmospherically

Looks like Seijun Suzuki! I would give even more than 86, but the last sequence is way over the top; with the baby, the redbull propaganda and stuff.

A highly stylized action film that falls short mostly to the cliched and under developed plot that lost it's steam two-thirds of the way in.

Nah

"Johnnie To's Exiled is a flabbergasting spectacle of kaleidoscopic violence that abstractly appraises codes of masculine honor." - Ed Gonzalez

A really exceptional gangster film, showing the structure of it, rather than any individual.

Never a particularly interesting or noteworthily exciting film, but thanks to its consistent style and delightful gunplay, mixed with To's more or less empathetic drawing of his tough, but vulnerable characters, Exiled please from start to end.