The Eastern Frontier

Stillness, Gesture and the Future of Hong Kong in Johnnie To’s The Mission

At the throw of a hat, the gunshots start to ring. Five men turn in unison to face their adversary on the parallel escalator, killing him with ease. Two of them anticipate, turn around, and see the reflections of other assassins above them, killing them promptly as well. The mall is empty, all shiny surfaces and remaining echoes of gunfire. By the time these five men reach the bottom of the escalator, they are in different positions aiming for another kill, almost statuesque in their posture, a still camera capturing them in wide. They do not need to move. Each cut navigates the camera around the environment, around each individual. And then someone pushes in a mirror. What is he hiding? What is he showing? This man is an assassin too, pretending to be a civilian, protecting another assassin behind his mirror. But our protagonists, for a brief moment, catch a glimpse of themselves. They reorient and see past the ruse, escaping without a scratch. And yet, that moment retains its weight. The insulated focus of pure adrenaline gives way to unexpected self-awareness

Such is the action centerpiece of Johnnie To’s The Mission, an action film keener on stillness than the kinetic mayhem that classic Hong Kong action films are generally known for. The Chinese term for action films (dongzuo pian) quite literally translates into “movement picture.” Not that there isn’t movement or a sense of acceleration in The Mission. It’s simply been modulated to emphasize different aspects of the film form, taking root in editing and sound rather than choreography or bombastic camera movement. The professional ethos instills within both its director and its characters the importance of strategy over brute force. Navigating new terrain requires a careful step rather than a loud one.

Part of this is a reflection of the Hong Kong that The Mission emerged in. Released two years after the handover, the film presented its vision of a refashioned Hong Kong action cinema to an industry that was in decline. Many of the city’s greatest directors and movie stars had already left for Hollywood, whose cultural commodities spent the entirety of the 1990s slowly chipping away at the prominence of local Hong Kong film productions. Piracy exploded, ticket sales declined and production costs continued to skyrocket.¹ The handover itself was not directly responsible, but it added to an atmosphere of uncertainty, an ever-growing presence of the globalized world and its supranational machinations. In spite of this decline, Hong Kong’s film industry did not actually die. Filmmakers like Johnnie To and his collaborators at Milkyway Image nonetheless remained.

Milkyway’s principles were simple. They wanted to be creative and to make quality films, often working on shoestring budgets and with a streamlined approach. Stories were made up on the fly, reviewed in the dailies and later adjusted and assembled in the editing room. The concise and elliptical quality of their work was just as much a creative choice as it was a practical one. In this sense, Milkyway inherited the traditional methods of Hong Kong cinema, rejecting the need for storyboards or shot lists, shooting roughly in sequence and dispensing with standard multicamera coverage. To himself learned from his time at TVB, an important training site for many of Hong Kong’s greatest actors and directors, lending his filmmaking an incredibly steady hand, usually taking the wild ideas of his creative partner Wai Ka-fai and grounding them in something more focused and precise.²

The Mission is a film made without Wai’s involvement, instead being a total distillation of To’s skills and preoccupations as a director, the literal mission statement that will guide his work for the following two decades. To shares this professionalism with the characters he creates, refracting cinematic form into performance. The film’s titular mission thus gains an added weight. Curtis (Anthony Wong) and his band of armed men can only protect the status quo of the organizations that hire them by spontaneously negotiating their own fates, bending rules and playing games of deception to eke out another day.

Little is romantic about these men, who spend a large chunk of the film’s runtime bogged down in occupational mundanities rather than displays of physical prowess. They retain an aura of sorts, no doubt, but it’s much quieter and more considered. Meeting in a corporate conference room, they are introduced to each other with forced niceties and awkward silences, a polite gesture from underling Shin (Jackie Lui) rejected by the sound of James’ (Lam Suet) peanut shells. Each character chooses their seat based on past alliances and levels of familiarity. You keep to your own turf, lest you accidentally step on anyone else’s toes. As Frank (Simon Yam) tells Curtis towards the end of the film, “These days, the organization treats everyone impartially.”

Every man handles his gun differently, minor adjustments in sound and weight impacting the recoil in one’s hand. With no resort to flashbacks or voiceover, The Mission instructs us to find character in action, transferring interiority to the gestures that these men perform in the present moment. Mike (Roy Cheung) throws his coat to distract a sniper while Shin runs out into the open. One is more strategic, the other impulsive. In place of a spoken apology, Curtis makes up to Roy (Francis Ng, credited as Francis Wong) by helping him kill a rival who was causing trouble at his bar. Curtis knows to do this because he happened to be in the same car as Roy when news broke of his bar being attacked. To’s narratives often function by only showing you something once, usually in an underhanded way, and paying it off much later. A moment or action gains its importance only in retrospect, a product of men who make their decisions in silence, deliberately hiding their intentions from each other.

Yet a kind of brotherly camaraderie does slowly develop. Perhaps it is only natural among a group of lounging coworkers, who need some kind of shared humor or entertainment to work through the boredom. While idly waiting for boss Lung (Eddy Ko) to leave, Shin initiates a game of paper ball with James that gradually extends to the entire crew. Initially stone-faced and stiff, they are all forced to loosen up. Mike and Shin extend their limbs well out of their seats to keep the game going. Curtis breaks his stance to take his turn. Roy darts his eyes around, betraying a deep investment in the whole affair. Knowing grins are exchanged. Outside of a few punctuating close-ups, this entire scene is captured in wide, buttressed by To’s signature widescreen CinemaScope. Each individual person is accommodated for by the frame, as well as their physical relation to each other and the space they inhabit. In spite of their conflicting personalities and commitments, a sense of collectivity is preserved.

To’s construction of character is horizontal instead of vertical. He is not interested in psychology or biography, nor does he have any desire to deal with conventional character arcs. For all intents and purposes, Curtis and his crew remain the same people they were at the beginning of the film. It is only in their collective existence that they start to break from their static molds, the mismatching of principles creating conflicts that have to be resolved through reflex and compromise. Curtis serves Lung above all else, while Roy is obligated to protect his underling, even in his stupidity. They both must stick to their own, yet they also understand each other, quietly hoping that a third way out exists.

The Mission’s multiplying of characters is paralleled by its recurring locations. In its first appearance, the mall escalators are safe. When they appear again, they’re littered with assassins. The backstreet right outside Lung’s office is initially ambushed by a sniper. Later, it’s used as a secluded place to kill off Lung’s adulterous wife. The film’s geographical insularity creates a sense that the world is governed by clear rules. Repetition breeds conformity in familiarity, even if that conformity entails killing people to protect your boss. But it also invites the threat of chance, the possibility of a good plan gone wrong by the variables we inevitably fail to predict. One day, a restaurant is a site for Curtis to make up to Roy. Another night, it’s a place for celebrating Fat Cheung’s (Wong Tin-lam) death. The story doesn’t end there, however. Just a few nights later, this same group of men will be staring down each other’s gun barrels, beer glasses still full. Reconciliation and unity could just as quickly descend into bloodshed.

In his book on Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy, Jim Kitses makes a direct connection between film noir and the iconography of American Westerns, claiming that “what gives Gun Crazy its centrality in the classic film noir cycle is its insight into the role of the Western myth…the pioneer mentality, the freedom so crucial in exploring a new land, the nomadic impulse to trek over the next hill, become in film noir the basis for the trajectory into darkness, the impulse to escape the ordinary and to wander.”³ Film noir, and by extension neo-noirs like The Mission, thus operate as urban Westerns. By the late 1990s, Hong Kong had long been a key interface between the reforming mainland Chinese developmental state and the capitalist world system it slowly sought membership in. The city’s rapid financialization was followed by an equally rapid deindustrialization, as local firms and international subcontractors for Japanese corporations moved manufacturing across the border to the Pearl River Delta.⁴ The personalized frontier of Curtis and his men are but instances of the new financialized frontier of Hong Kong, market freedom mutating into impersonal domination, a false sense of liberation giving way to a deep fatalism.

All that remains is violence. The guns they wield start to look a lot more flaccid, increasingly a show of weakness and futility rather than a determination of individual power. Nonetheless, it’s still what defines the five of them. What else are they beyond the recoil they can take? No wonder To chooses James, the group’s firearms dealer and expert, as our initial guiding character. The camera takes his lead as he stumbles out of a sweaty arcade. Along his winding path, summarized in a series of wipe transitions, we run into the other members of his future crew, all busy at their respective night jobs. James is the provider of their common language in gunfire, an unsubtle symbol of the phallic assertion of dominance. And it’s precisely through him that Curtis is able to find that third way without verbalizing it. Curtis knew that James would check his phone to see who he called and inform Roy about it. Curtis knew that there would be a visible discrepancy between the black gun that James gave him and the silver gun he actually pulls out. James is assured that he was not an asset to inter-turf conflict. Roy and Mike are convinced that Shin is dead, as is Frank. And James and Shin get to keep their lives, one remaining in Hong Kong and the other escaping into the dark of night. Nobody is hurt. The illusion of order is maintained.

But the illusion of order is still just an illusion. The inner world of the triad is a distinctly masculine refuge, even if it is slowly starting to resemble the tedium of regular employment. The threat to this insularity comes in the form of Lung’s wife (Elaine Eca Da Silva), whose mere presence is enough to change the tenor of a scene, forcing the men to hurriedly stand up from their chairs and offer their services. It’s especially striking given how unremarkable she is as a character, being granted effectively no interiority or even a name. At least in Exiled, the spiritual sequel to The Mission, To is willing to adopt the hackneyed yet nonetheless loaded archetypes of the mother and the whore. Here, women are only a disturbance. They are the anonymous secretaries who walk down the hallway, intruding upon the men’s game of paper ball. These brief disruptions in playful unity reverberate through to the end, where a more permanent split is brought upon the crew. However, it is only Lung’s wife who has to die, a sacrificial lamb that James just briefly registers, killed with little fanfare. She is denied the dignity of having her own Curtis, someone skillful and empathetic enough to save her.

Long before the scalding pessimism of the Election films, Life Without Principle and Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2, The Mission seems to posit a possible future for its characters, and perhaps Hong Kong itself. With enough finesse and maneuvering, the perfect configuration of professional discipline and pragmatic flexibility, there will always be a way out. Yet this belief is already undermined. There are still victims among those we barely acknowledge. And the lucky man himself who gets the chance to run into the night still must leave the city. The future is no less murky, the path no less undetermined.

1. Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004), 260-263.

2. David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Madison: Irving Way Institute Press, 2011), 244.

3. Jim Kitses, Gun Crazy (London: British Film Institute, 1996), 69.

4. Chuang, “Red Dust: The Capitalist Transition in China,” Chuang 2 (July 2019): 189-191.

Avalyn Wu is a filmmaker and writer based in New York City.