Engaging but depressing.
"Dog bite dog" marks my first Hong Kong drama. (spoiler free review)This show is for people who like psychological action movies. Its not crazy suspenseful, especially towards the middle, but I enjoyed the beginning and the end. To be honest, I expected more gore, but it was not as extreme as I expected. Now, I am not saying you should watch this if you have a light stomach. There were some pain-cringe worthy moments.
The title on the other hand is very odd, but after watching the movie, its more understandable. If you don't like sad endings, I don't recommend. At first, I didn't know how to feel after finishing the movie, but I am starting to process it more. The story is well written, but if you stop paying attention for 5 seconds, you'll be so confused, I learned from experience. The acting was great, the only problem was the amount of characters. I am still confused about who half of them were...
At first glance, the movie sounded weird and maybe even boring, but it was far from that. Recommend.
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This review may contain spoilers
An Intense Movie About Moral Gray Zones
Dog Bite Dog is a movie wherein we see a hitman kill 9 people including his mark, cops and a number of innocent bystanders. Watching him butcher so many people, I would hate him in one moment, and then see him with his love interest and suddenly want him to live so that he could redeem himself by loving her.He wasn’t used to feeling anything at all, let alone love. This was a person who’d grown up scavenging for discarded food at a landfill in Cambodia. As for landfills, it fascinating that he chose another landfill in Hong Kong to seek refuge after almost getting caught by the cops. He didn’t go to some nice park to unwind. Nope, he chose a landfill! That is what spoke of familiarity and home to this guy. I also noted that when the hitman fought with the cop, Wai, at the landfill he was biting Wai’s shoulder. The director was portraying him as a wild dog biting and chewing on human flesh.
Indeed, he was one of the Dogs in the title, “Dog Bites Dog.” The cop, Wai, was the other dog. Sure, Wai wasn’t as murderous as the hitman at first, but the signs were there that he was on his way to becoming so. Dang, he was breaking laws everywhere right from the start. He was constantly beating the shit out of witnesses. He gave drugs to informants in exchange for info. Presumably, Wai got those drugs from the police evidence room where cops keep drugs they take off drug dealers. Or he bought the drugs from dealers on the street. Either way, he got them illegally.
Overall, Wai was portrayed as violent, unruly and unethical. But he still had a father, his partner and colleagues he cared for, and they all humanized him. By the end he has lost all of them – and is now as alone in the world as the hitman was at the start of the movie. Accordingly, Wai also loses all morality, so much so that he even stabs a pregnant woman to death. He has now become inhuman. That is to say, he is now the Wild Dog.
The hitman, meanwhile, has become human via love for his wife and the impending birth of his child. He now has the family that Wai lost – and lost because the hitman killed all of them except dad, who killed himself. One can justify Wai’s angry lust for revenge. What’s amazing is that even though Wai was justified in wanting to kill the hitman, I wanted the hitman to continue his life as fruit picker with his new wife and baby. It’s a testament to the movie’s brilliance at portraying moral gray zones that I could sympathize with a hitman I’d witnessed killing 9 people.
It was a risky move for the writers to ask us to sympathize with such a character. And that was what they were knowingly doing by creating his tender, loving relationship with the girl. The writer/director created this moral gray zone by depicting the hitman holding the girl's hand, helping her walk after she'd injured her foot,, feeding her and just being all around attentive. In short, he is in love. It’s not only his first romantic love, but his first experience with any kind of love at all. We know that he never had the love of a family because he had grown up with a scumbag fight club owner. We know this, in turn, because he called the scumbag “dad” and, moreover, the scumbag said that he’d picked the hitman up off the street as a kid like a “stray dog.”
The scumbag and other dead-eyed boy fighters were all the hitman had ever known in his empty, brutal world where the only goal was to fill his belly and sleep somewhere warm. So his first experience with love – an abstract, emotional need rather than a physical need – had to have hit him with the awesome power of a thousand storms. But love ain’t enough to save him when the cop Wai is on the trail.
The hitman gained a family right as Wai lost his family, such that it was now Wait’s turn to live in a violent, soulless world working at a fight club. He even got one of the number tattoos on his neck that designated orphaned males after Pol Pot's Cambodian holocaust, and thus he blended in with the real men of the Cambodian Lost Generation. In other words, he had traded places with the hitman both literally and figuratively. He had nothing to live for except revenge.. And he was going to get revenge, even if he had to die for it. Which, of course, he did at the end
Now, about the ending. Wow, cutting that baby out was so unexpected and original! I’ve never seen this in a movie before. I also LOVED the way the hitman held the infant up to the sky, as if offering his gratitude to the heavens for its birth. Then, man-oh-man, the very final shot of the infant’s fist rising up toward the sun outdid that with an even more powerful message of hope.
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