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This chapter covers A Hero Never Dies, Running out of Time, The Mission, PTU (an acronym for Police Tactical Unit) and Breaking News which carry Johnnie To's name as the solo director. A Hero Never Dies marks the phase in the Milkyway company where the credit “Directed by Johnnie To” re-appears after a brief period in which To functioned as the chief executive overseeing the production of Milkyway's films rather than merely directing the films. Running out of Time and The Mission were both released in 1999 in the wake of the HKIFF tribute, and both films had the effect of confirming To's newly found status as a stand-alone auteur. PTU and Breaking News, released in 2003 and 2004 respectively, are mature examples of To's work in the genre and they show a tendency towards formalism — a sign that To was taking his status as auteur more seriously. To is considered a craftsman auteur, one able to craft superb sequences and integrate them seamlessly into the narratives.

This chapter reviews Johnnie To's enunciating role as an auteur of genre film through the convention of the happy ending, as a method of drawing certain conclusions about To's achievements to date. The happy ending is an ironic way of ending this epilogue, as will be made clear, but since To's career is ongoing and likely to contain more revelations and surprises, this chapter cannot make conclusions about his career as such, but about the way his films have ended — as a means to indicate To's contributions to genre and the art of cinema. To's ability to unsettle our perception of genre as a world of pleasure and closure is all part of his vision of Hong Kong on the road to Avici, but his action cinema carries a dialectical weight — fatalism carries meaning and redemption, thus the destiny of his films is something else entirely. The final action in the action films of Johnnie To is the act of inducing thought.

This chapter describes a cluster of action films that Johnnie To produced for Milkyway Image, the production company that he founded in 1996. It starts with a discussion with Beyond Hypothermia, a film released in 1996 and produced by To under a separate independent entity (the film was eventually affixed under the Milkyway banner after the setting up of the company and was released as a Milkyway film). It also addresses how the films Beyond Hypothermia, Too Many Ways to Be Number One (1997), The Odd One Dies (1997), The Longest Nite (1998), and Expect the Unexpected (1998), corroborate, reaffirm, and depart from the sum and substance of To's cinema. These films are all the more outstanding in that they were made in a spirit of creative freedom and apparently not much constraint over market considerations. The Milkyway films earned To his greatest critical acclaim thus far but, ironically, he was credited on these films as producer.

This monograph is a study of a genre and the work of a director in the contemporary Hong Kong cinema. The theoretical premise of this monograph is that the work of the director in focus, Johnnie To (Chinese name: To Kei-fung in Cantonese, Du Qifeng in Mandarin), has affected and changed the nature of genre and its industry more so than the other way around. Some of his works are presented. The auteur function is the centre of the film texts in this study, with genre occupying a subordinate position coordinated into the texts. The genre exerts are discussed as a constraint. It also retraces the history of To's achievements within the genre and poses a historicist connection between To, the action film genre, and the Hong Kong film industry. To's three periods of development are examined in order to consider the historicist connections and to see more clearly To's accomplishments and status vis-à-vis his contemporaries in the Hong Kong cinema. Furthermore, an overview of the chapters included in this monograph is provided.

This chapter explores a selection of Johnnie To's works where the flaws qualify his auteur status and make him an uneven auteur. It specifically describes Needing You, Help!, Fulltime Killer, Running on Karma, and Throw Down, another group of five films which constitutes an “uneven pentad” from the point of view of genre and To's direction. Though the nucleus of this study is the gunplay action film with a concentration on the gangster film or the cops-and-robbers thrillers, it also reviews To's contribution to the Hong Kong genre cinema in toto as much as possible. All of these films contain unequal measures of excellence and flaws which result from the effort to integrate different qualities.

This chapter provides an examination of the key films in Johnnie To's career ranging from the period 1988 to 1997, The Big Heat (1988), The Heroic Trio (1993), Executioners (1993), Loving You (1995) and Lifeline (1997), which form a group of five films containing the blueprints for his later masterpieces. From this discussion, To's films can be categorized into at least four broad categories: comedy, melodrama, martial arts, and the contemporary action adventure. The action films in this period of To's career show that he is concerned not so much with death as with the idea of physical impairment. His heroes seek to fulfil their duties despite impairments or flaws due to serious illness, injury or psycho-pathological causes. The female heroes of The Heroic Trio and Executioners are super-human Others inflicting the sort of mythical violence that Gods are capable of and yet have human drives of motherhood and having babies.

This chapter examines the increased dimensions of a New Asian regional identity since the 1980s by considering how Hong Kong cinema in the early twenty-first century has reworked itself in terms of this fractured New Asia. That is to say, Hong Kong and Hong Kong culture participate in the larger movements of modernity in the region. The chapter examines two films indicative of the particular cultural productiveness at stake: Jingle Ma's Tokyo—a Hong Kong film set almost entirely in a glossy Tokyo consonant with what might be said to be the libidinization of market modernity in the region—and Johnnie To's Fulltime Killer. Ma's film was one of the most popular in Hong Kong in 2000, and is distinct both in being a Hong Kong film set mainly in Japan and in having extensive Japanese dialogue. To's even more multilingual film unavoidably becomes an allegory of the East Asian core states competing.

This chapter summarizes the contribution to genre, examining Johnnie To's achievements from the critical-theoretical perspective of genre expectations, in particular the convention of the happy ending. It also updates To's career to the release of Exiled (2006), and deals with his three most recent films: Election, Election 2, and Exiled. The two panels in the Election diptych stand apart from the rest of To's films because they contain new visions of violence and clear political implications in their narratives. All of these three films reveal the director engaging in a dialectical discourse with his own work in the action genre. Violence in To's action cinema has a didactic function inasmuch as one's cognitive senses are provoked through the viscera of violence.

The Killer and other Hong Kong films directed by John Woo are frequently cited as important inspirations for certain filmmakers from the West. Quentin Tarantino heads this list, but among those influenced by Woo, Robert Rodriguez, Tony Scott, and Jim Jarmusch are sometimes mentioned. Much of the borrowing from Woo is superficial—two-handed gunning, doves flying—but in some cases, true homages are made, with Woo becoming a model much as Melville was for Woo himself. The question of influence becomes particularly vexed when considering work by more recent Hong Kong or Korean directors, including Kang Je-gyu and Park Chan-wook, arguably influenced by Woo, who may also react to films by Woo epigones like Tarantino Closer to home, Woo's film inspired some easy imitation, but it also seeded intriguing new growth in the form of several films by Johnnie To.

Have the techniques and technologies of the digital era so transformed cinema that they have changed the nature of viewers’ experiences? This chapter considers brief segments from a variety of films to address this question, including Summer of Sam, SLC Punk!, Run Lola Run, Se7en, Transformers, Death Proof, Kill Bill, (500) Days of Summer, Day Watch, and several by Johnnie To. In almost all cases, heightened audiovisual relations enable these new styles and forms, though other influences contribute too, including previsualization, CGI, Avid editing and Pro Tools; recent innovations in acting and lighting; changing forms of industry organization and production culture; varied modes of distribution and reception; and intensified global sharing across genres and styles. Attending to these segments may help us envision new forms of post-classical cinema.