Hong Kong > Hollywood

Election (2007 DVD)
Directed by Johnnie To
Hong Kong, 2005
In Cantonese and Mandarin with English subtitles

You don't have to be an androidal, failed ex-presidential candidate with a limited knowledge of geography to admit that "Asia or China" has already passed us by as the real action-movie superpower. I don't have a beef with the competition, and neither should you. Election, in other words, is a solid flick, an old-fashioned gangster story set against the backdrop of Triad warfare in Hong Kong at just about the time the British were handing the city back to its previous owners. If the political overtones I've mentioned help to give the plot a little more depth than you might expect, the real joys in watching this DVD are in the fine acting, the succession of characters who are at once vaguely familiar and yet worlds apart from their US bad guy counterparts, and--above all--in the kinetic storytelling that's mostly lacking in American action films these days. Oh, yeah, and no Bruce Willis either. (http://www.tartanvideousa.com/)