Bullets of Love (2001)

Bullets of Love is a 2001 film from director Andrew Lau (Infernal Affairs, which I probably should have watched instead). This movie has tonal and plot shifts that were baffling even for a Hong Kong flick. There isn’t much action, it isn’t really thrilling, the romance angle is DOA, and for once the tangents into melodrama and goofiness were my favorite parts.

It starts out with dogged cop Sam (Leon Lai) pursuing flamboyant criminal brothers Night and Day, catching Night after an energetic but shakily shot chase and showdown. The brothers are introduced dry humping and licking women in a nightclub, gross. Those women turn out to be drugged and trafficked, and Sam’s girlfriend Ann (Asaka Seto) is the prosecutor on Night’s case. Day sends a lady assassin after the couple. She observes them for a while, then follows them to Paris. Immediately after they get engaged, the assassin shoots Ann out of a glass elevator culminating in a hilarious green screen effect (from 2001, geez!). Sam is also shot.

Some time later Sam is in recovery in a remote town, where we get a whole new supporting cast. Sam is running a bar with Uncle Ox and mentally handicapped Uncle Tiger, mostly being used as a music practice space/hang out for a band of (not so young) ruffians. One day Sam sees a woman who looks just like Ann. After initially freaking both himself and her out, they communicate and he finds out she is a Japanese woman named You. Sam and You begin hanging out and crossing the language barrier. It is obvious You is the assassin, but for a while I could not tell if she was in love or just fucking with him. When she asked him how Ann died, I imagined him explaining, “Well, she got shot… out of an elevator… off of a building.”

This section goes on long enough that it has its own subplot about Uncle Tiger getting married. A rival gang of ruffians briefly scare off the also mentally handicapped woman from the wedding. At first I was worried it was implying these guys had assaulted her, but it seems like when they said they “taught her all about sex” they just told her scary and upsetting things, thank jebus. You finds her and comforts her until the wedding is back on. At the wedding Sam’s old partner tells him Night is getting out of prison. Sam tells You he has to leave town and they make love.

Sam tries to kill the criminal gang in the street and completely whiffs it. Thankfully, You followed him, and she cleans up his mess with some messy murder. Sam figures out You is the assassin. She tells him she fell in love watching him with Ann, so You killed her and had many painful surgeries to look like Ann. You was raised by the brothers’ criminal family as an unloved killer from childhood, you know the deal. In the meantime, the surviving criminal bro (I forget which) attacks the bar and slaughters the entire loveable band. Sam and You arrive to a hostage situation, Uncle Ox is killed and even Uncle Tiger gets shot up. You finally kills all the baddies and revives a somehow still alive Tiger. Then she shoots herself with her trademark three shot method she used on Ann and asks Sam to hold her.

I have no idea what they were going for here. It starts out about the law and order couple’s relationship and the criminal pursuit/case. After that is tragically cut short, the movie then oddly gets lighter with the goofy supporting cast in the small town. Then it has a romance(?) before turning into bloody revenge at the end. The romance doesn’t work, and any attempt to humanize You with her brief origin comes way too late. But it isn’t tense watching them grow closer because she doesn’t seem to want to hurt him, so I don’t know which they were going for. There are only a few brief bursts of action, none of them particularly memorable. Weirdly enough my favorite part of the movie was the time spent with the Uncles and the band, so it was bummer seeing them all shot up in the bloody (but still not particularly) exciting finale.

This is currently unstreamable and the out of print disc I borrowed from the Naro Video Library isn’t even anamorphic widescreen. This one doesn’t really need any kind of rediscovery or rerelease.