Synopsis
Vengeance (復仇, 2009) is a Hong Kong crime film by Johnnie To — watch it online on iFILM. French rock star Johnny Hallyday plays Costello, a chef who flies to Macau after his daughter's husband and children are killed by a hired crew. He recruits three local gunmen and sets out to find who ordered it.
The catch: a bullet lodged in Costello's skull is slowly stealing his memory. He's forgetting faces. At some point he may no longer remember the faces of the men he's hunting. To builds the film around that irony without ever making it sentimental — the action sequences are unhurried, almost choreographed, and the silences between confrontations carry more weight than the gunfire. Anthony Chau-Sang Wong, Gordon Lam and Simon Yam are the three hired hands, and To gives them enough room to feel like people rather than props.
The film competed in the main section at Cannes in 2009. For viewers who came to Hong Kong action cinema through The Mission or Exiled, this sits comfortably in that same register — genre as mood piece. Stream Vengeance (2009) online on iFILM.
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