Few directors make ac tion movies with the pizazz of Hong Kong’s Johnnie To, although his films rarely get runs in New York. That’s all the more reason to see his “Vengeance,” which opens today for a week.
In a casting coup, the film features two French stars, singer-actor Johnny Hallyday (sometimes called “the French Elvis”) and Sylvie Testud, one of her country’s most interesting actors.
Hallyday plays the laconic Costello, a gangster turned Parisian restaurant owner, who vows revenge against the paid mob assassins who severely wounded his daughter (Testud) and killed her Chinese husband and two kids.
Costello flies to Macau, where the killings took place, and hires three hit men of his own, played by To regulars, to find and eliminate the hoods who killed his grandkids.
The blood hunt picks up speed as the action switches to Hong Kong.
Complicating matters, Costello has a bullet lodged in his brain and is slowly losing his memory. In a throwback to Christopher Nolan’s 2000 thriller “Memento,” he takes photos of people he meets, then labels the snapshots so he knows friend from foe. It’s a hell of a way to go through life, although it seems to work in this case.
In a sequence that shows that even killers have compassion, Costello and associates postpone a shootout at a picnic when their prey’s wives and children show up. They eventually leave — and bullets fly and blood flows.
Let’s hope that more of To’s gems — “Sparrow” (2008) among them — find their way to New York theaters.