The second of Hong Konger Johnnie To’s back-to-back releases is better than its mate. Exiled/Fong juk may lack the 2006 New York Film Festival pedigree of Triad Election but is the more appealing of the two, in its good-natured combining of, on one hand, honorable thugs up against established mobsters and, on the other, the Westerns of violent Peckinpah and quirky sardonic Sergio Leone.

Less a snowballing of short set pieces than its prolific director/producer’s usual Asian actioners, it mixes brave deadpan sometimes comic crooks and comically cowardly cops, stolid laconic camaraderie, the expected (but not graphic) violence and a chivalric resolution. Although there is the difficulty of names mentioned only once or twice if at all, it manages the rare feat for the genre of developing relative depth and rooting interest in a wide spread of players. Hardly its maker’s “state of exile [as] an action of voluntary absence in search of a higher ideal, . . . a romantic sentiment,” even though the five principals do reach non-verbal commitment, the film does nonetheless point to individual/group decisions about loyalty in a less cardboard manner than most other such pictures.

In a few relaxed residential streets and clean pastel colonial buildings, DP Cheng Siu Keung‘s lens gives a quaint cobbled look to pretty drab, industrially dirtied Macau (or Macao), the tiny subtropical Portuguese city-territory that, following Hong Kong by thirty months, eight years ago was incorporated into China as a Special Administrative Region living off tourism, nine government casinos and racetracks, drug trading and related underworld activity.

In this period of flux, Tai (Francis Ng) and Cat (Roy Cheung) ask if former partner in crime Wo (Nick Cheung) is at home, but the latter’s wife Jin (Josie Ho) nurses her baby and maintains “there is no such person.” No sooner do the visitors begin a vigil in a tiny plaza, than a second two arrive -- bulletproof-vested Blaze (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang) and gum chewer Fat (Lam Suet) -- get the same response, eye the earlier arrivals, and also settle in to wait downstairs.

Particulars are not necessary or all that clear, but Wo appears to have botched with Tai a gangland killing of Hong Kong interloper Boss Fay (Simon Yam), fled alone but now come here as an honest working family man. Best friend Blaze ordered to rub out this turncoat, all the former friends humorously repair and furnish the couple’s bare apartment after a gloriously unresolved shootout on Wo’s appearance, then eat and drink before agreeing to look for one last caper as a fivesome to assure the future for Jin and baby.

SPOILER ALERT

To this end, they turn to hotel-whorehouse owner Jeff (Sui-Fai Cheung), among whose proposals is the heist of a police-escorted ton of government gold. They settle instead on five hundred thousand dollars for assassinating Boss Keung (Lam Ka Tung), “Macau’s most powerful gangster, your chances of escaping are slim.” The arranged killing at a domed restaurant is a double cross, Wo is shot but saved, and Fay is wounded.  A venal doctor leaves his prostitute to operate on Wo, the bleeding Boss shows up at the same clandestine clinic, and an imaginative, creatively photographed gun battle takes place on the levels of an exterior staircase.

With their married companion gone and themselves shot at by his widow, the four abandon their wire-cage vanette and flee by car to the arid outskirts of the SAR peninsula, through a dry quarry and then into woods where they stumble onto the government’s gold convoy under attack from other bandits. Opting for the underdog, lone surviving police Sergeant Chen (Richie Jen), they defeat the rival would-be robbers and, together with the sunglassed chain-smoking sharpshooting sergeant, appropriate the shipment.

All ready to embark, without the accustomed coin toss at first Blaze, then his companions, choose loyalty to a fallen comrade-in-arms. The policeman promises not to weigh anchor till daybreak, as the four go back to rescue that comrade’s baby son and vengeful widow from Boss Fay. Ensuring the woman and child’s future with a trick and “you must leave now,” they enter the “where’s the ambush?” fray. And what a wonderful brief battle it is, continuing the film’s sharp rap of pistols and ping of spent cartridges. Now more squarely in the vein of the oater than pure gangster flicks, the four prove once again that in movies there is honor among thieves. 

(Released by Magnolia Films and rated "R" for strong violence and some sexual content.)