Three scenes from “The Mission”
”To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.” - Leonard Bernstein
Johnnie To’s 1999 gangster film The Mission (Chinese: 鎗火) won him a Hong Kong Film Award for Best Director, and made his international reputation. Shot in 18 days on a shoestring budget, it is as concise and perfect as its constraints could make it. To later said "I only knew what film-making was about when making The Mission."
There is plenty of talk in The Mission, but not much from the five primary characters. To has acknowledged a debt to Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai in this regard. A note for a showing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art sees other influences -
[T]he film recalls grunt-level World War II–era works like Mann’s Men in War or Fuller’s Steel Helmet, zeroing in on doomed “men in the field”: loyal, skillful, focused, and utterly oblivious to their bosses’ machinations and double-crosses.”
With so little dialogue, The Mission rewards the attentive viewer in other ways. In many scenes where nothing much seems to be happening, a great deal is actually going on. The great Kozo of Love HK Film writes -
What occurs in the film makes complete sense despite the lack of overt exposition. The characters are revealed so well that we're able to understand who they are and what they're doing through minor emotion, or even just the slightest physical action.
The Mission insists on the importance of awareness over speech, and of focus amidst the noise.
”Ovaltine?”
The morning after an assassination attempt on Boss Lung, which the bodyguards barely foiled. Boss Lung enters.
Boss Lung: I’m not going to the office today.
Shin: Are you all right?
Boss Lung: It still hurts a little. (beat) I’m getting old.
Boss Lung (entering kitchen): Who wants coffee?
Bodyguards: …
Boss Lung: Milk tea?
Bodyguards: …
Boss Lung: Ovaltine?
Bodyguards: …
Boss Lung: What? Make yourself at home.
Bodyguards: …
(The shot changes so that Boss Lung is now in the foreground. The depth of field shifts so that Mike the outsider now blends in with the other bodyguards)
Boss Lung: If I was killed last night…it’s just my bad luck. You guys are not responsible. For someone in my position - you have to be ready for a lot of things.
Bodyguards: …
Boss Lung: Who doesn’t take sugar?
The Mall
“The Mission” comes ten years after John Woo’s “The Killer”, of which one critic said “if I’d known it’d be like this, I’d have bought lead futures.” Perhaps as an artistic response to Woo’s excesses, or possibly due to a limited ammunition budget, the third attempt on Boss Lung’s life has an austere, even minimalist quality:
Soccer
As the team jells, the mutual trust, confidence, and discipline become more evident, as shown in this brief but brilliant sequence:
Late in the film To one-ups Woo’s classic pistol standoffs, with four men aiming weapons at one another as they debate the fate of a fifth. By the peculiar math of the situation, the man without a gun is the one most likely to survive. But you’d have to be paying attention very closely to understand that.