TOO MANY WAYS TO BE NO. 1 (1997)
Director: Wai Ka-fai
Starring: Lau Ching-wan, Francis Ng, Elvis Tsui, Carmen Lee
95 minutes, color, 35mm
in Cantonese with English subtitles

"TO BE NO. 1 is about choice. Life is full of choices, some important, some not. Along these lines, things seem absurd." - Wai Ka-fai

In the year prior to the release of Too Many Ways to Be No. 1, the Young & Dangerous phenomena hit Hong Kong hard. A glamorized street epic portraying noble triads (Hong Kong’s criminal underground, like a cross between a street gang and the mafia) and based on a popular comic book, the triads embraced it as a heroic validation of their lifestyle, while society watchdogs clucked their tongues and wagged their fingers, all to no avail: the movie spawned five sequels, three prequels, two all-female spin-offs, and ten imitation flicks. 1996 was the year the craze broke, the year the first Y&D movie was made, and the year in which two of its sequels and several of its prequels and spin-offs all hit the screens within six months of each other.

Cut to 1997 as writer/director (and Takeshi Kitano fan) Wai Ka-fai's deconstruction of the triad film, Too Many Ways to Be No. 1, explodes like a smart bomb all over the genre. Tearing up the conventions of the triad movie from within, Wai's flick was originally considered a response to the Y&D phenomena, but in fact he'd been working on it for several years previously. For his characters, being a gangster is just a job: they'll either get rich or die trying. There aren't any heroes here.

Lau Ching-wan plays Kau (translation: Dog), a dumb punk who hooks up with some friends for lunch on a boiling hot summer day. The plan: go to China and sell stolen cars, or go to Taiwan and become hitmen. Fate intervenes and Kau gets to do both, with radical chronological consequences. The movie plays out three times, each replay revealing new dimensions to the characters, sometimes they're snivelling wrecks, other times they're cold-eyed killers. Some die, some live, and some die and come back from the dead just so they can get killed all over again. Run Lola Run a year before Run Lola Run existed Wai's movie cuts loose from traditional linear narrative, constructing a Buddhist universe full of branching paths, multiple choices, and characters reincarnated again and again. It's a movie structured along the lines of a religion, according to Wai.

Whatever. It's still a lot of fun. With black humor oozing out its pores, the flick takes a long view of the antics of the petty humans who populate it with the result that the simplest actions (a drink at a karaoke bar, a stiffed bill at a massage parlor) take on absurdist elements, breaking down the familiar into a surreal pageant. Produced on the run, Wai seems to have recruited his cameraman from a lunatic asylum and the resulting film is shot in throbbing fluorescent colors, backwards forwards and upside down by legendary DP Horace Wong, who shot all of John Woo's seminal crime movies (including A Better Tomorrow 1 and 2, The Killer, and Hard Boiled). Cut loose and given complete freedom, his camera jumps, ducks, skitters and hangs from the ceiling like a bat, hiding out anywhere it can find as it shoots these cheap hoods coming to their sticky ends and putting their feet in it left and right.

Deemed the most important film of 1997 by numerous Hong Kong critics, Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 is the cure for the triad movie blues and it’ll have you giving any crime flick that comes your way a suspicious glance. Important? Probably. A great big biscuit made out of fun? Absolutely.