Good concept, poorly executed.

Admirable film.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Let me start by stating that I'm a true Kar-Wai Wong fan. I've seen "In the mood for love", "Chungking Express" and "My Blueberry nights". I know his films are different and are not made for the "mainstream consumers", they must be analyzed differently.I was looking forward to watching this movie because I do love his art and so far I had never been let down.This movie definitely has some of the typical Kar-Wai's trademarks (e.g the deep and awesome soundtrack, the slow motions, the amazing colors, the cruel portrait of Hong Kong, the intriguing characters). But it stops there.The movie is boring, tiresome and the plot is very weak.If you're a fan I would recommend skipping this one and trying another one of Wong's masterpieces.

I have seen several of the directors other films and I must admit I find them beyond boring. This film stands out as his almost singular watchable movie as it contains action and the best shots in a film set in the real world-aka-not SF- I have ever seen. The images are truly excellent, gritty, realistic, and beautiful in a strange kind of way. The story leaves much to be desired in terms of the bombastic acting style in many places, real hyper stuff that will grate on the nerves, like a lousy martial arts movie made on a budget of 20 bucks. I think this film is worth seeing just for the visuals-you know what they say- a picture is worth a thousand words, well, in this case, I would say a picture is worth a million words. I have enjoyed many other films that are Asian Cinema, I just think the directors other films are plain bad.

Fallen Angels could have been so named due to its dropped origin as part of director Wong Kar Wai's previous film Chunking Express, emerging afterwards as a follow up. To hear the critics tell it, 'Express' is his masterpiece, regularly making the 'best movies ever made' lists along side such exalted company as your Citizens Kane's and Casablanca's. But for me Fallen Angels is, to date, the daddy of the Wong Kar Wai canon.Fallen Angel tells of a not quite burnt-out hit man, Leon, who begins to tire of the whole 'gun for hire' malarkey and decides to quit on account of his burgeoning feelings for the female operative who he has never met, but who plans his jobs for him. The female operative, Michelle, also emotes for our existential assassin but somehow they both realise that if they ever did come face to face the fantasy would evaporate. The unrequited love thing is Kar Wai's forte but here it is more a case of "As long as you don't look at it, it won't disappear." So their love continues on the basis of ensuring that it never really exists. Anxious to avoid an inevitable unprofessional encounter, our navel gazing killer goes off on an adventure into the Kowloon night where he crosses paths with a series of likable reprobates before embarking on that fatal "one last job." This takes us not so neatly into a 'mad as a hatter' subplot about a petty criminal who was rendered mute as a boy by a can of 'out of date' pineapples. He goes out at night and gets up to a range of activities such as massaging a dead pig and kidnapping a family and forcing them to eat ice cream. He to falls in love, with a girl who believes she has been beaten to the altar by someone called Blondie. He helps her go in search of the usurper of her affections resulting in a hilarious beating up of a blow up doll! Cinematographer and Kar Wai regular Christopher Doyle engages a warped and gaudy neon look throughout; something of a trade mark in Kar Wai films. This is the world from inside a Wurlitzer juke box – or, at least, through the eyes of a tranquilised goldfish and this, incidentally, is not a complaint. The other thing I like about this film is that it walks the line between the art house 'heart warmers' of the best of European cinema and the 'Glock Opera' pyrotechnics of John Woo and Ringo Lam. Genre clash – it's the future.

I was first introduced to this film about ten years ago (man, its already been ten years!!), along with Takeshi Kitano by a friend who was really into Asian cinema. At the time Beat Takeshi and Wong Kar Wai were not well known in the US at all. All the little fan boys (myself included) were still stuck on John Woo. My friend handed me a bootleg of "Fallen Angels" along with a copy of Beat Takeshi's "Violent Cop". I went home and put them in and thought, "what the hell am I watching!!!?!?? "Fallen Angels" had to be the weirdest, most unorthodox, most elliptical piece of film I'd ever looked at. EVERY SHOT looked weird and wrong. It seemed the director looked at every rule in the Hollywood filmmaker's guide and did the exact opposite! Also, it looked like the whole thing was shot with a security camera. Everything was fish-eyed. Too strange. But something about it made me keep watching. It actually took me a couple of tries to get all the way through it. It was just so odd, and hallucinatory.Then finally, I was able to get through the entire thing in one sitting, and that's when the magic happened. You MUST watch this film all the way through till the end in one sitting in order to "get it". The very end of the film is when the illuminating flash happens and when the film suddenly makes sense. If you do, I promise you, it will be a magical, sad and sweet, and extremely rewarding experience. This film by miles transcends the gangster genre. It is so many things at once. More than anything, in fact, it is a love story. But a love story in the same way (odd as it may sound) that "Last Picture Show" is a love story. It's about being madly in love with someone who will never be able to love you back.I actually liken this film to some of Sam Shepard's absurdist theater pieces from the 60s and 70s. Where for much of the duration you don't quite understand what you're looking at, although it seems the director MUST have some sort of plan, and then, at the end, all of the strands come together and it makes total sense.