Throwdown (2004, Johnnie To) (Patreon)

42/100

There are two kinds of very weird movies. Asked to name a very weird movie, you'd probably think first of something with outré imagery and dream/nightmare logic: Eraserhead, Tetsuo, practically anything by Maddin or Jodorowsky. Some films, though, are very weird not because they serve up overt weirdness, but because they don't behave or function the way that even superficially weird movies generally do. What's weird about them is that they seem to have been made by people who want to use cinema to tell a somewhat conventional story, but who possess only a fuzzy understanding of how that's done. Were the director a neophyte, you might feel comfortable dismissing such disjointed work as ineptitude. But (s)he's not, and you don't. It's not amateurish. It's just weird.

That's where I stand with Throwdown, which assembles a bunch of perfectly ordinary characters and narratives—brash, ambitious kid challenges his hero; former legend struggles to regain his mojo; aspiring performer tries to make it in the big city—and explores them in ways that make no damn sense to me at all. The nature of this incoherence is hard to articulate, so I was relieved, looking up peers' reviews from long ago, to see that Michael Sicinski compared Throwdown to Denis' The Intruder—one of the great stealth head-scratchers of our time, exactly the other kind of Very Weird Movie that I'm talking about. Though my nearly 20-year-old memory of that film (all I ever wrote, from Toronto, was "What. The. Mighty. Mother. Fuck") leans heavily on the word "cryptic," whereas I don't think there's a single moment in Throwdown that leaves one uncertain about what's going on. The pertinent question is always "But...why?" Michael hypothesized that To deliberately omits a lot of generic exposition, but my experience was of a film in which any given scene seems only tangentially related to the scenes that precede and follow it, and in which relationships that are clearly intended to be meaningful strike me as emotionally illegible. 

Take, for example, the initial meeting of our three protagonists. Tony shows up at Bo's karaoke club looking for a fight. At the same time, Mona shows up looking for a singing gig. (I don't understand why a karaoke joint would be hiring a singer, but never mind. Never done karaoke myself, don't even know how it works in America, much less in Hong Kong.) "Follow me," Bo tells them, and then suddenly they're all part of an elaborate mini-heist in which Tony and Mona distract the target—the former by playing a video game very noisily—while Bo steals a satchel containing cash, replacing it with an empty lookalike. Evidently I'm not supposed to wonder things like: Wait, is this a plan Bo already had in the works? If not, where did the identical satchel come from? If so, why are both of his very necessary accomplices people who just arrived in his life 30 seconds ago? Had he been sitting there wistfully thinking "This is such a dynamite idea—all I need is two random folks to help me execute it"? And the kicker is that none of this matters in the slightest, because Bo instantly loses all of the money gambling and we're right back where we started, as if that never happened. 

Or, better yet, take Throwdown's standout sequence—one of my favorites in any To film (and I've seen 18). Having acquired another stake, Bo returns to the illicit casino, wins big, but keeps playing, risking it all again and again, ignoring Mona's entreaties for him to take the money and run. Familiar gambling-addict stuff, though this isn't really a film about addiction. Inevitably, he loses it all, at which point Mona just grabs his former winnings and sprints out the door. At first, it doesn't appear as if anyone's giving chase (here's where I'd charge ineptitude were the director Joe Schmo rather than John To), but eventually we do see three big dudes running behind them, scooping up bills that are flying from Mona's arms as she runs. We then get a magnificent shot—this is all happening on gorgeously lit nighttime streets (the whole film is gorgeously lit, with gold-streaked interiors to die for)—of Mona duck-waddling back the way she came, picking up bills, while her three pursuers duck-waddle toward her, doing likewise. When they get close enough to attack, she's saved by Bo, who hurtles into the fray out of nowhere and proceeds to get the shit kicked out of him while Mona waits terrified around a corner. When Bo staggers to her, though, missing one shoe, she runs back to where the three men are still collecting stray bills and retrieves it, while they just watch, seemingly dumbfounded. It's formally dazzling and almost unbearably romantic, and if you showed it to me out of context, I'd be very excited to see the entire movie. But it doesn't proceed from a dynamic we've previously witnessed, nor does it lead to anything in particular. You could excise it from the film without anyone sensing anything missing. It's just sort of...there. Amazing, but in isolation. And that's true of just about every scene, except that the others are much less amazing. (Doesn't help that if you ranked the martial arts from most to least thrilling, from a spectator's perspective, judo would surely rank dead last.) I can discern a thematic throughline about helping others recover from a fall, but our central trio's mutualistic dynamic is flimsy and unsatisfying, with Bo and Mona ill-defined and Tony borderline irrelevant. All of the raw ingredients are there, but they haven't been properly cooked into a meal. If I invited you to dinner at my house and served a bunch of random uncooked foods, you'd say: Weird.

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: Criterion recently released the film as Throw Down, two words, but it was Throwdown for its 2005 U.S. theatrical release. I would call the dual-language title card on the film itself ambiguous, but the lowercase 'd' strongly suggests that whoever distributed it in '05 was correct.