In a Woo film you can be sure of three things: melodrama, violence, and melodrama through violence. For him the world of gangsters and killers is not so different from that of friends and lovers; indeed we should remember that these gangsters and killers themselves are surely the friends and lovers of someone in the world. To us we may see them as gangsters and killers first, but in Woo's films this is often a consequence of life's injustice. They only become that way because what else are they to do? When life has already gone and killed their own friends and lovers, what's left but to enact their own violence back onto life?That being said, Bullet in the Head is no ordinary Woo film. Here, it is not merely life that's violent but the world at large, and appropriately this is not a story about men who merely shoot other men. No, it is a story about how at some point, should you survive long enough in this hellscape of reality trying not to kill your own fellow man, the world itself will come knocking at your door just to break it and drag you out kicking and screaming. And if you don't put a bullet straight through the world then the world will put a bullet straight through you. A violence so traumatic it destroys even melodrama.
