Director: Edmond Pang

Starring: Simon Yam, Annie Liu, Nick Cheung,

Featuring: Irene Wan, Eric Tsang, Chapman To, Maggie Shaw

Since Exodus comes from Edmond Pang, the director of the cult favorite You Shoot I Shoot, and is billed as a black comedy, you would think it would go down a similar road. The answer is “not really”.

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While Exodus is certainly a quirky film, it isn’t as cohesive as You Shoot I Shoot in getting its’ point across — which seems to be here that women are materialistic bitches who are willing to kill men for the slightest provocation. Yeah, this isn’t exactly a good movie to watch with the ladies.

Simon Yam plays Kin, a cop who’s perfectly content to ride the pine doing a desk job, even though his wife Ann (Annie Liu, who unfortunately doesn’t seem to have developed her acting ability since her debut in 2005’s Ah Sou) keeps harping on him to get a “real” job so that they can finish remodeling their dream house.

While taking a statement from a suspect in a peeping case named Ping (Nick Cheung), Kin is told about a conspiracy among Hong Kong women to kill the men in their lives while making the deaths look like accidents. Kin doesn’t believe Ping at first, but after he becomes involved with Ping’s wife (Irene Wan), the proceedings around him take a strange turn.

This sort of thing is certainly more fleshed-out than your usual Hong Kong thriller. Thankfully, there’s nary a ghost to be seen anywhere, and there’s a much-appreciated lack of slow-motion montages while some cheesy Cantopop single by the latest EEG acquisition plays.

As a whole, the film certainly has a great mise-en-scene. Via cinematography from Charlie Lam and a sweeping score courtesy of Gabriele Roberto, Exodus has a pastoral, almost soothing quality to it, which is a bit strange (but still welcomed) given the sometimes tawdry nature of the proceedings.

Unfortunately, even with how well-constructed the movie is technically, Edmond Pang uses all the restraint of a hooker on a meth binge and rams the point of Exodus into the viewer’s head many times over. There’s some very obvious attempts to go for shock value, with drug use, liberal utterances of profanity, and a fairly graphic (at least by mainstream Hong Kong standards) sex scene.

It’s quite surprising, especially given the somewhat more restrictive nature of Hong Kong cinema nowadays, that Exodus was only given a IIB rating. But instead of livening up the proceedings, these methods just come off as cheap gimmicks.

Combined with an ending that offers no resolution, Exodus is ultimately an interesting, but failed, experiment. It’s still worth your time, but be prepared to come out of this with a lot of unanswered questions and a bit of a feeling that there was a lot of wasted potential here.
Film Review By: Roger Fenton

You can buy this DVD at: www.hongkong-store.com