Amazon.com This visceral Southeast Asian battle drama is the film John Woo completed just before his commercial breakthrough with A Better Tomorrow in 1987. It was shelved for almost two years and then hastily released, to cash in on that film's startling success. Although not a fully coherent work, it is the film in which the director tried out the operatic, slo-mo approach to action that he perfected in his later pictures, so it's must viewing for Woo-philes. The setup is polished off in a quick prologue, as a squad of Chinese commandos is dispatched to smash a heroin ring in Thailand. The movie is pretty much nonstop action from that point on. The commandos find and kidnap the top drug smuggler, and then flee, pursued by an army of murderous goons. There are several long comic gambling scenes; it's the Deer Hunter's Russian roulette number played with dice instead of guns. Woo has always been a bold borrower of trope he admired in other movies. In this case the best sequence is lifted almost shot-for-shot from one of the Japanese Lone Wolf and Cub samurai movies: a plucky kid digging in the ground for safety when the baddies try to burn him out of his concealment in a grain field. --David Chute --This text refers to the VHS Tape edition. Listmania!
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