| I first purchased a VCD of the film direct from Hong Kong, put out by Mei Ah (VCD0008). The drawback was that when I played the VCD, the English subtitles were crowded off the screen, compromising my ability to get the full flavor of the plot points. That convinced me that I wanted to try to find a DVD as well, which I eventually did.
In watching the DVD I realized that there was footage missing that I had on the VCD. I did some web research about it--one Chow Yun Fat site, A FreeMan in Hong Kong, even had reviews/photos of the cut and uncut versions in their review gallery.
Anyway, scenes cut include:
- How Knife and Crawl exploit Chocolate's talents while testing his gambling prowess;
- How Chocolate "helps" Jane by trying to impersonate Knife to impress her parents;
- How Knife comes to owe Shing $37,000 and is unable to repay it and
- How Ko Chun becomes aware of Yee's duplicity.
These cuts reduce the running time of the film by about a half an hour, and in my opinion, do not in any way help the film, as a couple of the plot points are pretty important to the film (especially #4 as listed above, but also #3--heck, they're all pretty important in my not-unbiased opinion!!). |
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