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.
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