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O (Takashi Sorimachi) a very quiet & reclusive Japanese, is
Asia's professional killer number one, but that is a position that Tok
(Andy Lau), an extrovert, eccentric & movie-obsessed mainland
Chinese, desperately tries to attain, even if it means duelling O for
it. Caught in between them is Chin (Kelly Lin), a video-store clerk who
has a part time job as cleaning woman at O's fake appartment - in fact O
lives across the street & can spy on anything in this appartment
through a camera lense -, but who is getting romantically involved with
Tok, who tries to get to O through her. On their trail are Interpol
agent Lee (Simon Yam9 & his assistant Gigi (Cherrie Ying), who,
despite obtaining more & more information about Tok & O, always
stay one step behind the 2. After numerous shoot-outs, with both Tok
& O being betrayed by their respective clients, but both coming out
on top, the police actually manages to find O's real appartment & to
corner him & Chin, with no way out for them ... or so it seems, as -
unexpectedly - Tok turns up on a rooftop & helps O & Chin
significantly in shooting their way out, badly wounding or killing
everyone from the police but agent Lee. That same night, at Lee's
office, Tok turns up, delivering a box full of evidence against both
hinmself and O, but before Lee can capture him, he steals the piece of
evidence already in possession of the police he came for & vanishes
into thin air. Understandably shaken by both this experience & the
death of his assistant Gigi in above-mentioned shoot-out, Lee quits
Interpol & - on Tok's advice - starts writing a book about the case,
a book that - to his great disappointment - has no ending ... But then
Chin comes along, who tells him the rest of the story, about how she
went on the run with O, about when they met up with tok again &
turned a woman between 2 men, about how Tok - in an almost friendly
atmosphere, challenged O to a duel, about how he set up a fireworks
storage building so that they both would have equal chances, & about
how he finally shot O, with in the end both of them getting what they
want in a way - Tok now being killer number one & O obscuring his
identity forever that way ... Or so she says, but couldn't it have
been the other way, that Tok suffered a collaps caused by the bright
& blinking lights of the fireworks accidently going off & being
shot by O ? Put into simple words, Fulltime Killer
seems a rather silly, simple minded & overly convoluted movie, put
onto celluloid though it becomes a clever & ironic (but not
parodistic or comedic) statement on the killer-genre as a whole - as
would be exüpedcted from director Johnny To -, showing a vastly
ritualized world that has an inner logic which is totally out of touch
with reality (reality as we would presume it that is), which is of
course just as well, since the relation of a high-ocaane-action movie
& realism has always been somewhat weird in the first place. That
most of the beatuifully choreographed action-scenes constantly border
the sarcastic only helps in proving that point. If this makes the
movie sound like a brainheavy but boring exercise in
genre-deconstruction though, Fulltime Killer isn't, it actually
manages to stay entertaining from beginning to end, providing
first-class action & excitement throughout. |