Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 (Wai Ka-fai, 1997) (Patreon)

Since Wai Ka-fai is "in the news" right now, owing to his very well-received new film Detective vs. Sleuths, I thought it was time to finally go back and watch his defining solo effort, a film that has been recommended to me over the years by numerous friends, most recently Shelly Kraicer. Loyal followers of Vern already know that Too Many Ways is a special film in many respects. But I suppose I wasn't expecting this particular kind of structural whirlygig. Wai doesn't deconstruct the Hong Kong gangster film so much as he takes it apart and reassembles it "wrong," resulting in an abstract cinematic sculpture, one in which the camera is a more powerful weapon than the gun.

Too Many Ways centers, sort of, on small time gangster Kau (Ching Wan Lau). He's 32 years old, has no money, and has hit a dead end in his life. A palm reader tells him early on that he will either become rich or die trying, and this sets the tone for the next 80 minutes of frenetic activity. He is accosted on the street by another triad wannabe, Bo (Tat-Ming Cheung), who recruits him for a car theft that will take them and their large crew to Mainland China to deal with high-level triads. But Wai focuses more on preparation and various distractions than the heist itself, which goes wrong for a myriad of reasons, not least of which is that Kau fails to mention that he doesn't know how to drive.

Wai and cinematographer Wong Wing-Hang (the DP behind most of John Woo's early classics) treat this basic scenario as an opportunity for outlandish formal invention. At a meal, the camera swivels at the center of the table like a Lazy Susan. During a fight at a massage parlor, someone knocks the camera upside down, and it remains so for the duration of the scene. And the fast pace of the action, combined with Wai's preference for edge-distorted wide angle shows and exaggerated deep space, all resemble a Tex Avery riff on the already-advanced work of Wai's chief collaborator, Johnnie To. 

Although most of the film's action hinges on Kau and his decisions -- more on that in a second -- Too Many Ways is primarily a film about unwieldy crowds and heaps of bodies in confusing tussles and mobs. It is often impossible to locate a particular character amidst the flailing throng, and this accentuates Wai's visual fixation on pure kineticism and chaos. Seemingly innocuous plot points, like who will pay a restaurant bill or Kau and his confidante Matt (Francis Ng) meeting up with other gangs, don't so much push the plot along as they disassemble the frame into a subatomic frenzy. This is a film that moves; that it its primary objective.

Most of the first half of Too Many Ways shows the Chinese job falling apart. At this point, the plot resets, Run Lola Run style, to offer Kau a different option. Instead of working the Mainland job, he agrees to help Matt perform some clean-up work for a Taiwanese gang. Although the results are not quite as disastrous, a night of heavy drinking trips Kau and Matt up, placing them in the hitman's equivalent to one of those two-dates-for-the-prom sitcom scenarios. Stuck between two rival gangs and their fiercely loyal foot soldiers, Kau tries, and eventually fails, to negotiate his way out of the jam.

As with the first half, the Taiwanese segment employs a formalist feint designed to trip Kau and Matt up. Wai provides so many clashing constituencies that it is impossible for the two friends, much less the audience, to keep everyone straight. And of course, the camerawork is no help, serving to obfuscate the field of action rather than clarify it. The Taiwan segment ends with a manic, all-hands-on-deck showdown that struck me as a fairly clear inspiration for Miike's Dead of Alive trilogy. The only thing more dangerous than gunplay is confusion, with gangster after gangster cutting off his own fingers to atone for things they didn't even do.

Given that Wai made Too Many Ways in 1996, with Milkyway releasing it in 1997, many observers have construed the film as a whacked-out allegory for the Hong Kong handover. The "Hongkies," as they are called here, get in trouble by trying to ply their trade on the Mainland, but things don't go all that much better in Taiwan. In Planet Hong Kong, David Bordwell argues that Wai and company are subtly insisting on Hong Kong self-sufficiency, if not outright autonomy. Although Bordwell is mostly referring to the plot itself, the formal mayhem of Too Many Ways has an even bigger role to play in this reading. Up is down, territories are ever shifting, and there is no way to ever really understand where terra firma might be.

All of this, of course, plays differently now than it did even in 1997, since Xi's neo-authoritarianism has realized Hong Kongers' worst fears. This alone is reason enough for Criterion or some other boutique label to restore and re-subtitle Too Many Ways for re-release. But if we consider how Kau's story begins -- palmistry, a reading of fate -- Wai's allegory is that much more potent. When democracy is threatened, that threat cannot be faced by an individual, even one imbued with the cinematic power of turning back time. Kau may have options, but his ultimate trajectory is a collective one. And when reality is warping all around you, the only logical choice is to meet chaos with even more chaos, to turn the son-of-a-bitch upside down and hang on for dear life.