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Bookmark this pageBreaking News (2004)
Director: Johnny To
Movie review
From Time Out London
To’s ‘Full Time Killer’, which made a virtue of its implausible premise (two hitmen chase each other across south-east Asia, romancing the same girl en route), was panache 24 times a second; ‘Breaking News’ is just silly. Granted, it’s the real HK choreography deal, as the opening shoot-out – a five-minute take that registers a ‘Scarface’-worth of trigger-pulling with ‘Touch of Evil’-style cranework – declares. Then tension and credibility unwind as Ren’s fistful of hoods holes up in an eighth-storey flat and the cops, marshalled by a robotic Chen, posture for the TV crews. When the techno-literate villains upload 3G clips of police pratfalls to the web, the fuzz hire a movie director to edit their footage – and so the message takes shape: it’s the media, stupid. Shame the gags (flatulence) and characterisation (truculence) are as rudimentary as the social theory.Author: SC
Time Out London Issue 1790: December 8-15 2004
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