John Woo Between Extremes: ‘Bullet in the Head’ and ‘Once a Thief’ Join the Shout! Factory

Released between his two most acclaimed works, John Woo’s 1990 war epic Bullet in the Head and 1991 heist comedy Once a Thief have long been obscured by the shadows cast by The Killer and Hard Boiled. Now, Shout! Factory’s souped-up, restored 4K presentations offer an overdue opportunity to evaluate the films on their own terms.

Bullet in the Head emerged from the fractious termination of Woo’s working relationship with Tsui Hark and is effectively a reworking of Woo’s treatment for what would become A Better Tomorrow III. The film follows a trio of gangsters (played by Tony Leung, Jacky Cheung, and Waise Lee) who decide to hide out from a murder rap in Hong Kong by taking a smuggling job in Vietnam just as the war is heating up in 1967. Almost immediately, the magnitude of their mistake becomes clear as they find themselves in the middle of guerrilla raids, terror campaigns, and clandestine activities by various foreign agents using the chaos to make a quick buck.

Woo draws liberally from the trove of Vietnam War movies, staging epic battles in villages with overt cues to Apocalypse Now and mirroring The Deer Hunter’s structure of slow psychological unraveling among friends. In doing so, he retools the visual tics of his Heroic Bloodshed era to a story in which his usual notions of chivalric nobility among lowlifes is almost entirely absent.

There are moments where Woo’s more rousing impulses are on display—as in a phenomenal shootout in a Saigon nightclub where the characters attempt to rescue a woman forced into prostitution by a gang boss—but otherwise all the usual hallmarks of his action cinema are used to highlight the nihilism of violence. He uses slow motion to draw out the execution of civilians, an expressionistic spray of blood spurting from the temple of an innocent man reflecting the time-halting horror with which the protagonists witness it. The sequences depicting U.S. and North Vietnamese assaults on villages demonstrate a gift for massive-scale action choreography that Woo would bring to his subsequent Hard Boiled, but here the staging emphasizes not a clarity of motion but the overwhelming chaos of being caught in the crossfire of war.

In the final act’s depiction of betrayal and trauma that tears apart the friend group is a complete obliteration of Woo’s usual rendering of some core of morality and decency in his antiheroes. What minor traces of nobility the main characters display are overtaken by their attempts to smuggle gold out of Vietnam—a lust that drives some to brutality. Heavily edited down from Woo’s initial three-hour cut, Bullet in the Head is nonetheless one of the director’s finest and most cohesive films, and the one that most seriously interrogates the ethics of his oeuvre.

By comparison, Once a Thief is an outlier in Woo’s mature period, closer in spirit to his pre-breakthrough workman era making comedic genre pictures. Reuniting with Chow Yun Fat, Woo stages a convoluted caper about art thieves (played by Chow, Leslie Cheung, and Cherie Chung) tasked with stealing a painting from Paris. The film is at its best in the small displays of visual wit that Woo uses to keep things moving, as in the hand signals the characters use to direct each other in social settings, or the thieves having a pet dog pee on a shipping crate during loading outside a museum to mark it for the crew’s later heist during transport.

The most disjointed and unengaging film of Woo’s golden period, Once a Thief increasingly leans into mawkish melodrama, halfheartedly gesturing at the more earnest commentaries on friendship that Woo makes better in nearly all his other movies from this period. Unnecessary flashbacks to the trio’s lifelong shared history are superfluous and further slow the film’s pace. Finally, an abrupt pivot in the second half toward the more serious, epic action of Woo’s other work clashes badly with the tone established to that point. In seeking to be every kind of late-’80s Hong Kong genre picture at once, the film succeeds at being none of them.

Nonetheless, Once a Thief is a solid enough Lunar New Year comedy, and it’s nice to see a Woo-Chow collaboration that leans on the latter’s Cary Grant-esque gift for screwball comedy over his tougher action-hero persona. Even when his character is left disabled by a double cross, Chow maintains a level of whimsical affability that helps to hold the film’s dramatic tonal shifts together. He also shares real chemistry with Cheung and Chung, each actor silently communicating a shared history between the characters that the film too often feels the need to spell out explicitly. And among other things, Once a Thief is clearly a dry run for the equally unwieldy but vastly upscaled frenzy of Woo’s soapy blockbuster Mission: Impossible II.

Bullet in the Head and Once a Thief are now available from Shout! Factory.