Election

Election (2005)
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434008/]

The Gist:
Right before I started this project I watched my first Johnny To film, Exiled, and vowed to watch from the director. This is my second film I've watched by the man, and in some ways this movie delivers once more on the tight narrative style of the former movie and in some ways it leaves me a little disappointed. This is basically a gangster film, you can feel the American influence on the way the story is told but I will say that it is its own creature. For one thing, the violence is so weirdly subdued, you never see a gun once in this film. It's all pretty much bludgeoning and slashing, and even those moments are rare. I will say that there is a big fight in the middle with machetes that is fucking awesome. In the end I loved this film up to the last fifteen minutes, then it become every other gangster film I've ever watched where we must show how "being a gangster" will corrupt your soul and make you betray those around you etc. (see: Godfather, Gomorrah, Scarface, Godfellas, and every single other gangster film ever made) I've never really liked this particular genre convention. Well sometimes I do, the first Godfather manages to do this without bugging me (note the second one does this and does bug me). However, it often feels like we trade some of the intensity of the film for a moral standard that was implemented largely because of the Hays Code and the old school gangster films of the late 20s, early 30s or whenever that was. I understand that often it gives the film more depth, but this film is so sleek and stylized that I would have rather it continued with its momentum rather than get bogged down in the closing moments. All in all great film though, I'm sure I'll forgive its ending eventually.