Lock up your white doves because old school John Woo is back in the house. The action maestro makes a return to the cop action film with MANHUNT, a remake of a classic 1976 Japanese action film.
Actor Zhang Hanyu stars as a prosecutor accused of heinous crimes he didn’t commit. In grand action film form, he sets out on a mission to clear his name in a ballet of bullets. Based on the Japanese book by Jukô Nishimura, later made into a film directed by Junya Sato and starring Ken Takakura, it also stars Japanese leading man Masaharu Fukuyama as the detective on the hunt for the fugitive.
The brief trailer could have easily sat on the front of a VHS tape picked on a lazy Friday afternoon, the kind you ultimately skipped through before watching The Killer or A Better Tomorrow for the umpteenth time. Now it is elevated to high art, as the director steps away from his multi-part epics Red Cliff and The Crossing and returns to the genre that made many of us fall in love with his work in the first place.
MANHUNT will premiere at the Venice International Film Festival and TIFF before being released to Chinese theaters on 16 February 2018. With any luck, Australian distributors will aim for the same day and date release they have been following for high-profile Asian cinema of late.
