Stunning action, Hollywood production values: how Johnnie To’s PTU and Breaking News changed the game for Hong Kong crime movies in the 2000s
- Johnnie To’s 2003 film PTU marked a turning point in his work – he went from off-the-cuff action films to slick, cinematic stories with high production values
- He followed that in 2004 with Breaking News, whose unbroken, 7-minute opening was a visual tour de force and which, unusually, had a leading female character
Johnnie To Kei-fung had already made a name for himself with a string of commercial hit films before reinventing himself as an action-movie auteur in the late 1990s. The 2000s saw him continue to hone his unique style.
Below we discuss two of To’s game-changing crime films from that decade.
PTU (2003)
PTU – which stands for Police Tactical Unit – marked a turning point in To’s body of work. The director and producer made a number of idiosyncratic, often eccentric, action films in the 1990s, such as A Hero Never Dies and Where a Good Man Goes.
Those films were good looking, and made on reasonable budgets, but they had an independent, off-the-cuff feel.
PTU was something different entirely. It was slick and elegant, with a watertight script by To regular Yau Nai-hoi, glorious wide-angle cinematography courtesy of Cheng Siu-keung, precision editing and an eerie score that melded strange hisses and white noise with an atmospheric guitar-rock soundtrack.
Production values were as high as for an American film, and To’s cool hand behind the cameras evinced a total mastery of all the elements of filmmaking.