Shout! Factory
It’s hard to imagine two films coming out in less than a year’s time from the same director that are as different as John Woo’s Bullet in the Head and Once a Thief.
One is a gritty maximalist war film that stands as John Woo’s most personal and political work to date, while the subject of this review, Once a Thief, is a light heist comedy.
Both films have been underseen compared to The Killer and Hard Boiled which book-end them, but whereas Bullet in the Head is maybe the greatest achievement of the Hong Kong New Wave, Once a Thief sadly is filled with light, Cantonese-style comedy that doesn’t always translate.
In Once a Thief, three art thieves raised together in Hong Kong by a local gangster find their professional and personal relationships tested by betrayal.
Joe (Leslie Cheung), Jim (Chow Yun-fat), and Cherie (Cherie Chung) work under the manipulative Mr. Chow (Kenneth Tsang), who sends them to steal a priceless painting in France that may or may not be cursed. When the heist goes wrong, Joe is presumed dead and Jim and Cherie go to ground to avoid the heat from Interpol. Years later, Jim and Cherie find out Joe is alive and the blown heist was a set-up from Chow leading to a final confrontation and a second chance at the heist of a lifetime.
John Woo made Once a Thief quite consciously as a crowd-pleasing Lunar New Year release, dialing back the operatic bloodshed of his late-1980s heroic bloodshed cycle in favor of international escapism and a more playful take on his cherished themes of friendship, fate and greed.
Since the international breakthrough of A Better Tomorrow, Woo had become synonymous with balletic gunfights and tragic brotherhood, but before 1987 he had built his reputation directing broad Cantonese comedies. Once a Thief feels like a deliberate return to that earlier style: the criminal milieu is treated with a champagne lightness, the love triangle is teasing rather than doom-laden, and even the action set pieces are staged with a wink and rhythmic buoyancy rather than apocalyptic despair.
The film is also steeped in love for the middle period of Hitchcock and the national cinema of France. Chow Yun-fat is deliberately styled to look like Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief in the film’s opening sequences and you can feel Woo, who adores the French New Wave, taking his time and enjoying each and every establishing shot on his location work in Paris. The film is stylish and beautiful, and the three leads are clearly having the time of their lives.
Unfortunately it’s paced more like a European vacation than a tense Triad thriller as the film takes forever to get going into the complex suspense and action set pieces you would expect from 90’s John Woo and much of that time is given over to a style of Cantonese comedy that doesn’t always translate to American sensibilities.
What does translate to the American sensibility is the absolute chaos Woo is willing to unleash with destruction derby car chases, pyrotechnics, and the old reliable sight of Chow Yun-fat in a suit with a Beretta 92 mowing through legions of criminal scumbags and looking cool as hell doing it. Leslie Cheung plays against type as a more braggadocious, risk-taking thief and Cherie Cheung is great as the woman they both love.
This is the weakest picture of Woo’s great Hong Kong run, even the collaborative effort Just Heroes, which is due for a release from Shout in the coming year, is a stronger overall entry. I do think a big part of that is also what we see in Woo’s western work many times: without the real thread of tragedy that underlines his best films, the audacity of the action is never grounded in pain so there’s no depth or contradiction or texture to it.
This film gets real commitment out of its leads in the same way something like A Better Tomorrow does– where the performances feel like old Hollywood in how genuine they are. It’s just missing that fatalistic mood that carries Woo’s films to their highest peaks.
That said, it’s still peak John Woo and if you know you’re in for a slower, sillier pace you will be handsomely rewarded with some of the biggest and best action scenes of the early 90’s. This is still an easy recommendation.
