THIS JUST IN: "BREAKING NEWS!"
Here in 1999, veteran Hong Kong director Johnnie To isn’t exactly a household name. Even amongst the Asian video retailers in Chinatown, To doesn’t light the spark of recognition the way John Woo, Jackie Chan, or even Wong Kar-Wai does.
However, if you’re a future boy like me, and veteran of the discount HK DVD bins circa 2004, you know exactly who Johnnie To is and what films he’s made. "Fulltime Killer"; "Expect the Unexpected"; "PTU"; "Running on Karma." Granted, that last one is overrated slop, but the rest are entertaining films, each featuring strong direction and acting.
Now, if my information is correct, To’s "breakthrough" hit, a little movie called "The Mission," should be opening in Hong Kong theaters in just a few months. Never heard of "The Mission?"
The story of five hitmen hired to play bodyguard for an aging gangster? It earned numerous awards and critical acclaim. Supposedly, this movie was the first Hong Kong flick to blend the traditional street-level grit of Woo, Kirk Wong, and Ringo Lam with the minimalist style of Takeshi Kitano. It was hugely popular. But more importantly, its subsequent box office haul gave Johnnie To leverage to make movies that didn’t fall into the black hole of the heroic bloodshed or triad kid genres (1997’s "The Odd One Dies," and 1998’s "A Hero Never Dies" represent To’s contribution to those two categories), which dominated Hong Kong theaters from the mid-80’s to late 90’s.
When "The Mission" eventually hits Chinatown—which may not happen until early next year—I intend to see it. But seeing as how I have to whet my palate in the meantime, I went to Flushing during my last sojourn back to the future, and picked up a bootleg of To’s 2004 thriller, "Breaking News."
I approached "Breaking News" with high expectations. After all, it was an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, though not during the same year as Vincent Gallo’s disastrous first cut of "The Brown Bunny." "Breaking News" is probably a better movie than the Cannes version of "…Bunny," and succeeds brilliantly as a tense, urban action film. Unfortunately, I got the feeling that To was also trying to work in some pointed commentary about the media, and that aspect didn’t come off nearly as well.
Exactly what am I talking about? I’m talking about the efforts of Inspector Rebecca (Kelly Chan), an ambitious police officer who becomes a female version of Ed Harris from "The Truman Show." After the cops are humiliated on television by heavily-armed bandits, she suggests that the capture of these criminals should go down before camera. The footage could be edited, then given to all the major media outlets, thus giving the police department a much-needed boost of positive PR.
It helps that Detective Cheung (Nick Chen) and his unit have the outlaw gang holed up in a downtown apartment complex. Inspector Rebecca gets permission from top brass to have every cop on his/her way to the scene fitted with a miniature camera, while she sits in a sort of "nerve center" for the operation, surrounded by video screens. Of course, since this is a movie, things can’t go according to plan. ATTENTION! SPOILERS AHEAD! Rebecca’s carefully-groomed footage of the SWAT team arriving downtown barely hits the airwaves when firefights bubble up prematurely, explosions devastate entire floors, hostages are taken, and the criminal gang engages in some media manipulation of its own.
The clash between police spinner and criminal spinner should be as interesting as the movie’s visceral gunfights. Truthfully, the initial battle between them is probably the film’s best: After Rebecca tells news crews that SWAT forces have the crooks pinned down in an apartment, Yuen, leader of the gang, leaks photos onto the Internet that show quite the opposite to be true. How did Yuen take the photos? Using the camera feature on his cell phone. Later, Yuen leaks photos showing crooks and hostages eating dinner together. Rebecca replies, "He wants the public to view the gang as human beings. In that case, we’ll show them that cops are human beings, too."
In what could be deemed satire, Rebecca orders all the cops on the scene to be given lunch simultaneously. Since one of the crooks is a chef, the criminals/hostages get to eat surprisingly well. In a brilliant retaliatory stroke, Rebecca orders the police lunch to be even better than the criminals.’ As news crews look on, all the cops gets a styrofoam take-out box. One particular reporter gets an in-depth scoop regarding the contents of one of the boxes, and proclaims it, "the most elaborate lunch ever ordered by the police department."
Looks like satire. Sounds like satire. But I’m not sure Johnnie To himself realizes he’s got a great premise on his hands. After the lunch thing, the spinner vs. spinner game degenerates into more of the same bullet ballet action. But I will grant you, the closing moments of the film bring us back onto the satirical track. Witty: A newscaster reports that Hong Kong is safer than ever, then switches to "breaking news" about an incident where police have just gunned down a crook.
My personal problem: Johnnie To views Rebecca as the heroine, bravely trying to keep her production of "The Perfect Police Bust" from falling apart at the seams. Rebecca, however, is a manipulative liar. In the course of her puppeteering, she paints an increasingly optimistic picture of a police siege that is not going according to plan at all. She reports that police casualties are minimal, when the exact opposite is true. Towards the end of the movie, she declares absolute victory for the police department, even though two of the suspects are still on the lam.
Doesn’t this behavior seem to echo events in a place like, say, Iraq, circa 2004? For those of you reading this between the years 1999 and 2003, the future American administration will invade Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that don’t actually exist. They will subsequently paint a picture of the occupation that is rosier than the rising American death tolls would indicate. And Johnnie To will co-write and direct a movie that takes a media manipulator, who doesn’t believe in being candid with the public, and makes her chief of police of something.
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And yet, I cannot ignore some of "Breaking News’" spectacular technical moments. For example, it opens with a long, unbroken shot that goes 6 minutes, 45 seconds. For a single unbroken shot, that’s a very long time. While it may not be as complicated as the opening of Orson Welles’ "Touch of Evil," it is certainly worth viewing and reviewing. For nearly seven minutes, the camera swoops down to ground level, cranes back up along the outside of a building, cranes back down, tracks around a car, tracks into a shop, tracks back out to the street, does a 180-degree pan, cranes back up and follows a character as he makes a spectacular leap from a window… It goes on and on, and through most of it guns are blazing, and glass is shattering. It is truly a magnificent sequence.
