Placemat Killers

Once again we watch a movie because it was covered on Filmsack: The Replacement Killers (1998), starring Chow Yun-Fat and Mira Sorvino, directed by Antoine Fuqua, but produced by and owing a lot to John Woo.

Chow plays a hitman working in America for Kenneth Tang's Triad. He balks at an assignment and has to go on the run, turning to forger Mira Sorvino for papers. Pretty soon they are both on the run and Tang has brought in a couple of ...replacement killers, Danny Trejo and Til Schweiger. There are shoot-outs in Sorvino's studio, in a game arcade, in a car wash, you name it. And yes, Chow and Sorvino pose in slo-mo side by side, with guns pointed in opposite directions. There is no shortage of action, and no complaints about the quality thereof.

Also - Chow Yun-Fat looks positively badass. As soon as Ms. Spenser saw him, she gasped, "He's Alain Delon!" Which seems funny at first, since Delon had an icy beauty, and Chow is kind of a pudding face. But he nonetheless just exudes cool and the air that he would kill you as soon as look at you.

There's some funny bits, like hip-hop scuzzball Loco, played by Clifton Gonzalez Gonzalez, now tragically calling himself Clifton Collins, Jr. But this is mostly a classic action movie - maybe one of the defining movies of the modern action era.