Dog Bite Dog (2006)

Engaging but depressing.

"Dog bite dog" marks my first Hong Kong drama. (spoiler free review)

This show is for people who like psychological action movies. Its not crazy suspenseful, especially towards the middle, but I enjoyed the beginning and the end. To be honest, I expected more gore, but it was not as extreme as I expected. Now, I am not saying you should watch this if you have a light stomach. There were some pain-cringe worthy moments.

The title on the other hand is very odd, but after watching the movie, its more understandable. If you don't like sad endings, I don't recommend. At first, I didn't know how to feel after finishing the movie, but I am starting to process it more. The story is well written, but if you stop paying attention for 5 seconds, you'll be so confused, I learned from experience. The acting was great, the only problem was the amount of characters. I am still confused about who half of them were...

At first glance, the movie sounded weird and maybe even boring, but it was far from that. Recommend.

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An Intense Movie About Moral Gray Zones

Dog Bite Dog is a movie wherein we see a hitman kill 9 people including:

1 Barrister who was his original paid mark
1 Civilian at a restaurant
1 of the other main character's police partners
1 innocent cabdriver simply to steal his cab
3 cops in an alleyway shootout
2 tugboat operators whom he killed simply to steal their tugboat

Watching him butcher 9 people, I would hate him in one moment, and then see him with his love interest and suddenly want him to live so that he could redeem himself by loving her. There was so much tenderness in a scene of him putting boxer shorts on her to hide her naked ass. He wanted to give her some dignity after being raped by the man whom the hitman had just realized was her father. It was likely the first time the hitman had ever shown affection for another human being. Or received care from someone else, as when she clobbered the cop, Wai, at the landfill to save him.

Then, god, there was a scene of her wiping his arm while he was pumping gas right after his former fight club boss had humiliated him. It was her way of showing that she understood he’d been emotionally hurt and wanted to comfort him. His expression was that of someone who is moved, while also confused by that new feeling. He wasn’t used to feeling such things with another human being.

He wasn’t used to feeling anything nice at all. This was a person who’d grown up scavenging for discarded food at a landfill in Cambodia. As for landfills, it fascinating that he chose another landfill in Hong Kong to seek refuge after almost getting caught by the cops. He didn’t go to some nice park to unwind. Nope, he chose a landfill! That is what spoke of familiarity and home to this guy. I also noted that when the hitman fought with Wai at the landfill he was biting Wai’s shoulder. The director was portraying him as a wild dog biting and chewing on human flesh. Later on, the cops nicknamed him, yep, Wild Dog.

Indeed, he was one of the Dogs in the title, “Dog Bites Dog.” The cop, Wai, was the other dog. Sure, Wai wasn’t as murderous as the hitman at first, but the signs were there that he was on his way to becoming so. Dang, he was breaking laws everywhere right from the start. He was constantly beating the shit out of witnesses. He gave drugs to informants in exchange for info. Presumably, Wai got those drugs from the police evidence room where cops keep drugs they take off drug dealers. Or he bought the drugs from dealers on the street. Either way, he got them illegally.

Overall, Wai was portrayed as violent, unruly and unethical. But he still had a father, his partner and colleagues he cared for, and they all humanized him. By the end he has lost all of them – and is now as alone in the world as the hitman was at the start of the movie. Accordingly, Wai also loses all morality, so much so that he even stabs a pregnant woman to death. He has now become inhuman. That is to say, he is now the Wild Dog.

The hitman, meanwhile, has become human via love for his wife and the impending birth of his child. He now has the family that Wai lost – and lost because the hitman killed all of them except dad, who killed himself. One can justify Wai’s angry lust for revenge. What’s amazing is that even though Wai was justified in wanting to kill the hitman, I wanted the hitman to continue his life as fruit picker with his new wife and baby. It’s a testament to the movie’s brilliance at portraying moral gray zones that I could sympathize with a hitman I’d witnessed killing 9 people.

And this was not some glamorized hitman in a sleek, black Armani suit as we usually see. Or a hitman pulling superhero level judo movies like “Leon the Professional” (ie, the movie where a pedo hitman loves a 12 yr old Natalie Portman). This hitman is filthy and monosyllabic while stuffing food into his gullet like a starved dog, and biting his opponent like a dog. Nothing glamorous about him. Yet, son of a bitch, the director made me care about him anyway!,

It was a risky move for the writers to ask us to sympathize with such a character. And that was what they were knowingly doing by creating his tender, loving relationship with the girl. The writer/director created this moral gray zone by depicting the hitman holding the girl's hand, helping her walk after she'd injured her foot,, feeding her and just being all around attentive. In short, he is in love. It’s not only his first romantic love, but his first experience with any kind of love at all. We know that he never had the love of a family because he had grown up with a scumbag fight club owner. We know this, in turn, because he called the scumbag “dad” and, moreover, the scumbag said that he’d picked the hitman up off the street as a kid like a “stray dog.”

The scumbag and other dead-eyed boy fighters were all the hitman had ever known in his empty, brutal world where the only goal was to fill his belly and sleep somewhere warm. So his first experience with love – an abstract, emotional need rather than a physical need – had to have hit him with the awesome power of a thousand storms. But love ain’t enough to save him when the cop Wai is on the trail.

The hitman gained a family right as Wai lost his family, such that it was now Wait’s turn to live in a violent, soulless world working at a fight club. He even got one of the number tattoos on his neck that designated orphaned males after Pol Pot's Cambodian holocaust, and thus he blended in with the real men of the Cambodian Lost Generation. In other words, he had traded places with the hitman both literally and figuratively. He had nothing to live for except revenge.. And he was going to get revenge, even if he had to die for it. Which, of course, he did at the end

Now, about the ending. The girl dies at 9 months pregnant, so the hitman cuts the baby out of her stomach, then dies himself with the baby in his arms. That would’ve been perfection….. if, that is, the writer/director had indicated that someone was nearby to save the baby. As it stood, that newborn was alone under the hot sun at an empty temple grounds while all the adults are dead and, as such, would also be dead within hours. I wish they had written a bit with a car driving by and noticing the dead bodies, whereupon the driver would go to save the infant.

If that infant survived, it would have been the perfect ending for this movie. Because it would have symbolized how there was no hope for the current generation, while there was glorious hope for their offspring. We already knew that the hitman believed this, because it’s why he cut his baby out in the first place. He NEEDED to see that his child was alive before he, himself, died. Cutting that baby out was so unexpected and original! I’ve never seen this in a movie before.

I also LOVED the way the hitman held the infant up to the sky, as if offering his gratitude to the heavens for its birth. The shot of him holding the baby against a sky shooting sunbeams imparted a message of hope. Then, man-oh-man, the very final shot of the infant’s fist rising up toward the sun outdid that with an even more powerful message of hope. Well, it COULD have been full of hope if only the viewer had just one teensy indication that someone was going to save that infant

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