Movie Review: Let the Bullets Fly/讓子彈飛

I saw this film a while ago, and between CNY and other stuff, it took me this long to write the review. Sorry about that!

Let the Bullets Fly/ 讓子彈

飛 tells the story of a duel between con artists involving the control (and exploitation) of a small town in China. Peripheral characters get involved, willingly and/or otherwise.

I don’t want to exhaustively relate the narrative, for two major reasons.

One, I try very hard to know as little as possible about a film before I see it. So naturally, I will write reviews the same way. I want to tell you what I think about a movie, not about the movie,  per se.

The other reason is that the narrative of  Let the Bullets Fly/ 讓子彈飛

would be nearly impossible to describe.  I don’t mean that as a criticism. It’s just a very narratively dense film that covers an awful lot of ground.

It was great to see Carina Lau onscreen again. It’s always great.

Chow Yun Fat was great too, but only half the time.

Because he played two roles.

One of them was funny and interesting and entertaining. Chow is a great actor with magnificent presence and is almost always captivating in the way that the classic stars of the last century were.

But that was only half his performance.

The other seemed to be playing to the lowest common denominator of the Chinese audience, mugging, screaming and overacting enough to make Eric Kot Man Fai blush.

Since I am not one of those people this character was made to please, this particular aspect of his performance, and indeed the film itself, was lost on me.

A good portion of Let the Bullets Fly/ 讓子彈飛

featured such low-brow activity, and while I found it annoying, I was more than happy to allow it to co-exist with an awful lot of witty, sly, and wholly entertaining other stuff that I did like.

Let the Bullets Fly/ 讓子彈飛 is, if anything, a gigantic smorgasbord (!) of movie-making, with more than enough for everyone. It is crass, nostalgic, refined, vulgar, funny, mean, and confusing in equal measure.

While I can’t say it was among my favorite films of recent viewing, and while I might even struggle to call it good, I will say that I am really glad that films like this are being made in China . Its reach exceeds its grasp, but at least it is reaching.

For that, I am grateful.