Kaiju Shakedown was quick to point out the mysterious sudden appearance of the R1 DVD release of Johnnie To's nighttime actioner, PTU, from Dragon Dynasty. Set for a March 25 release.
The film's title may have survived the (usually) requisite title change (eg, the terrible fate of The Banquet at the hands of those obsessed with legends and poisonous creatures), but like Infernal Affairs and Triad Election, there's some mischievous photoshopping afoot. The DVD cover, featuring Simon Yam adopting a Chow Yun Fat/John Woo two-gun menace, makes the film seem absolutely loud and explosive. Woe are those who buy it to test their high-end home-theatre speakers.
PTU is a sometimes intense thriller about a cop (Lam Suet) who loses his gun in a scuffle one night. A whole series of trouble ensues from that little mishap. The opening set-up at a restaurant is imaginative and surprising, and the rest of the film moves at a confident pace toward a taut finale.
Don't look for explosions though..
This has actually been up for pre-order for a few weeks now, they did just add the cover art last week. Bey Logan mentioned that it was an upcoming Dragon Dynasty release in his blog on their website many months ago. Great flick, I love to see Suet Lam in a leading role.
Suet Lam love all around! :)
Until Johnnie To's recent run of top-shelf flicks (Election, Exiled, etc.), this was my favourite.
Wait, you sure this is Dragon Dynasty? The title still reads "PTU" Shouldn't it be corrupted to something like "The Legend of PTU" or "Dragon Cops of Fury"?
Maybe they're finally learning their lesson?
I like Lam Suet...
...when he doesn't have that disturbingly long hair hanging from his mole.
Amazon has Flashpoint up with an April release date. So much for that theatrical release.
Count me in with the "Throwdown Defense Force", i seriously love that film.
It's quiet sometime that i have seen this movie.I can remember that the movie started well,but then the movie went into the wrong direction and it started to stangle itself,and the finale killed this movie.
That's like the cover for the R1 dvd of Joint Security Area. It looked like a nuclear apocalypse.
"nuclear apocalypse"
thank goodness they didn't think of that as the title!
While I couldn't bear to sit through all of Magnolia, I don't recall a cop's lost gun as the central point of the movie. I remember lots of people living their lives, but I don't recall a central narrative in that film.
That said, while there are other movies that may involve a cop's lost gun, I don't recall any that dwelled on how said gun impacted the officer like Stray Dog and PTU. PTU does have the Milky Way trademark of throwing in a totally unrelated "twist" in the latter half of the movie, but overall I don't see it as much different than Stray Dog.
Kurosawa certainly had several films that centered around the bureaucracy of post-war Japan and an attempt to find a post-war Japanese identity. To certainly didn't do that with PTU (and indeed I can't recall a film of his that dealt much with identity crisis the 1997 handover covered in other movies of that time) but aside from his comedies, I do find PTU to be one of his most derivative films.
that's not to say it is a bad film. It is one of my favorite To films, certainly standing out amongst his output for the preceeding 3-4 years. Perhaps the length of the shooting had some part in keeping the story simple and very focused.
I do find it interesting that Throwdown was cited by To as a tribute to Kurosawa.
1) Missing Gun is the name of a film with a similar plot line; it stars Jiang Wen
2) Throwdown is a tribute to Kurosawa because it's a big homage to Sanshiro Sugata
3) The frogs weren't a twist in Magnolia. They were a plot point. A twist implies that it reveals something about everything we've seen up til that point. They were a plot development.
You couldn't sit through all of Magnolia? Really? Admittedly it is a flawed film but, seriously, I still consider it a minor American classic.
The missing gun plot involved John C. Reilly's police officer character and that plot -- with the rapping kid -- was very underdeveloped (the published script has whole scenes that explained that kid's significance in the story that would have helped make that plot thread more meaningful).
My only point was that the missing gun is a convenient device for a cop film and that, while similar, Stray Dog was more concerned about the levels of Japanese society following World War 2 and PTU was more concerned with plot.
In some ways, I admire To's film more because he does not have the pretensions that Kurosawa had but to say that is probably opening a big can of worms.