Entertainment

Let the Bullets Fly

‘Let the Bullets Fly’’ — China’s highest-grossing film of all time — stars action hero Chow Yun-fat and the movie’s director-writer, Jiang Wen, as competing crooks in Goose Town, a dusty pit stop in lawless 1920s rural China. Yes, bullets do fly as the two try to outsmart each other with escalating double- and triple-crosses.

At 132 minutes, the film is at least half an hour too long. Nobody asked me, but the best solution would be to keep the action sequences (such as the robbery of a horse-drawn steam train, an homage to Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West’’), and scrap the allegedly “witty’’ dialogue and difficult-to-follow plot twists. Word is that Jiang went though 30 drafts of the script before he was satisfied. Perhaps he should have gone for 31.