Home :: DVD :: Action & Adventure :: Martial Arts  

Animal Action
Blackmail, Murder & Mayhem
Blaxploitation
Classics
Comic Action
Crime
Cult Classics
Disaster Films
Espionage
Futuristic
General
Hong Kong Action
Jungle Action
Kids & Teens
Martial Arts

Military & War
Romantic Adventure
Science Fiction
Sea Adventure
Series & Sequels
Superheroes
Swashbucklers
Television
Thrillers
Heroes Shed No Tears

Heroes Shed No Tears

List Price: $29.98
Your Price: $26.98
Product Info Reviews

Features:
  • Color
  • Widescreen


Description:

This visceral Southeast Asian battle drama is the film John Woo completed just before his commercial breakthrough with A Better Tomorrow in 1987. It was shelved for almost two years and then hastily released, to cash in on that film's startling success. Although not a fully coherent work, it is the film in which the director tried out the operatic, slo-mo approach to action that he perfected in his later pictures, so it's must viewing for Woo-philes. The setup is polished off in a quick prologue, as a squad of Chinese commandos is dispatched to smash a heroin ring in Thailand. The movie is pretty much nonstop action from that point on. The commandos find and kidnap the top drug smuggler, and then flee, pursued by an army of murderous goons. There are several long comic gambling scenes; it's the Deer Hunter's Russian roulette number played with dice instead of guns. Woo has always been a bold borrower of trope he admired in other movies. In this case the best sequence is lifted almost shot-for-shot from one of the Japanese Lone Wolf and Cub samurai movies: a plucky kid digging in the ground for safety when the baddies try to burn him out of his concealment in a grain field. --David Chute
© 2004, ReviewFocus or its affiliates