John Woo’s Manhunt plays like a joyous parody of his action classics
Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the Toronto International Film Festival.
It’s always possible that John Woo could have played the doves straight. The Hong Kong director behind action classics like Hard Boiled, and A Better Tomorrow (and later American movies including Face/Off, Broken Arrow) has turned the image of doves flying across the screen during a firefight into a signature trope, suggesting the end of innocence and the arrival of chaos. But in his latest, Manhunt, when a careening car approaches a dovecote filled with birds ready for their big moment, it doesn’t read as portentous and tragic, like the dove sequences…
