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Even if you've seen John Woo's other signature bloodbaths, you might not be prepared for this hyper-violent epic. It doesn't help that the director himself is setting out to blindside the viewer with it. At the start, the violence is as elegant and stylized as any Woo has ever committed to celluloid. The gang fight at the start of this movie is more of a ballet than a the gang fights in Walter Hills The Warriors and the movie seems to settle into a comfortable sixties-era romanticism to go with it. But then the movie moves to Vietnam and takes a sharp left turn into nightmare.

In Woo's other major work --in The Killer, in Hard Boiled, in the Better Tomorrow films--the violence is an externalized expression of the passions of the characters. That's the reason for the sentimentality that many critics fault in his work --it's the source of the violence, not a contrast to it. Bullet in the Head is different. The sentiment is there, sure, as is the violence which stems from it, but that doesn't explain the extremity of violence once the action moves to Vietnam. Once the streets of Hong Kong are abandoned for the streets of Saigon, the violence takes on the cast and the weight of real violence. It is dazzlingly well staged, as one would expect from one of the world's premier action directors, but any hint of stylization vanishes once Woo reinacts the famous photograph from which the film takes its name. Bullet in the Head is ostensibly about fish out of water--its main trio of characters are small time hoods who flee to Vietnam to become war profiteers--but that isn't what Woo is really interested in here. The gangster angle is only a McGuffin. What Bullet in the Head is really about is the contrast between make-believe violence and the real McCoy. And it drives home its point with devastating effect.