Once A Thief (1991)

Directed by
Genre
Unbalanced
Reviewed by Simon on 2001-12-06
Highly regarded Woo comedy actioner starring Chow Yun-Fat, Leslie Cheung and Cherie Cheung as a trio of super-thiefs who are in Paris to steal paintings. Disappointing for me though - it seemed like a mess of a movie. The comedy is strange, often surreal, and doesn't seem integrated with the movie - it was jarring. The plot is reasonably shambolic too. The movie features a number of action scenes, which are reasonably superlative and OTT in a woo style (the ending is very ABT2), but these too are very jarring in a movie that's meant to be a comedy... the boys massacre hundreds of people, including a bunch of cops (err, I think, memory haze), all quite violently... but cheerfully this time. All meant to be ha ha, fun romps, but it's hard to ignore the fact they just mercilessly killed a whole bunch of people. Oh well, it's not a completely meritless film anyway.