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| Fun and Flawed. Shot with an amazing kinetic energy and filled with great acting and humor, The Odd One Dies ultimately fails as a post-WKW, Godard-inspired genre romp. Takeshi Kaneshiro shines in his performance as a fringe player on the streets, a gambler who just doesn't give a damn. Nothing he does seems to make sense, to him or anyone else. He just does what he feels like, whenever and wherever. Luckily, he is not an evil man and so when he meets a kindred spirit, Carmen Lee, he softens and finds purpose. However, their burgeoning romance is complicated by money, murder, and a lack of trust. The film is a lot of fun at moments and has some truly brilliant scenes and running gags (the aforemoentioned finger-slicing) but it fails to come together. The would-be lover/killers are too damn cute and innocent to be convincing as part of the triad world and Carmen Lee's character suffers from an over-written and over-wrought back story. Definitely worth seeing if you are a fan of either of the two leads. |
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| | | | | Hoping to unite two hearts that have given up hope, so that each can see in the other an extreme (giving up, filthy and hopeless) and come to realize the need for redemption and to go to another extreme (clean, happy and lively). But the script indulges in a mind set of "everybody owes me" and the characters' humanity and sense of humour become overwrought with anguish. Only when the main characters later return to a state of trust and openness does the film show some humanity. | | LOG IN TO COMMENT ON THIS REVIEW! |
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| | | | | Between brutishness and rebelliousness, between loving deeply and being humble, between raggedly and dressing to one's desire, between not caring and not afraid to get killed, there is a fake soul and an ugliness masquerading as pride as well as a selfish act of betrayal. Death should have a significance in this frivolous world, and it is to respect other lives and to give oneself a chance for quiet reflection. | | LOG IN TO COMMENT ON THIS REVIEW! |
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| | | | | The director seems to have a fondness for a lot of local and foreign films, such as Days of Being Wild, The Professional, Fallen Angels... etc., drawing elements from them to use in his film. This is a romantic love story, its male and female leads both killers with stubborn dispositions. The filmmakers try to capture the romance and absurdity of the plot situation, especially in the many confrontations Takeshi Kaneshiro has with the mob boss. But the result is less than satisfactory and the film is less than exciting. | | LOG IN TO COMMENT ON THIS REVIEW! |
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