MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

chaos-rampant Some movies are tableaux observed from a fixed distance, a remnant of old theatrical ways they don't whisper so we will get up close and listen they shout out at us in our seat, their motions stopping at the edge of that figurative stage created by the camera. A Wong Kar Wai movie throws itself at you, or it stays the distance and invites you to climb the stage and take intimate looks, and none does it better from what I've seen so far than Fallen Angels. This is a movie that sends us hurling at top speed through the electric night of Hong Kong, blurred neon colors bleeding by the camera in splashes of light and shape, then it holes itself up in cheap fleabag rooms or dingy bathrooms to stare itself at the mirror or lie in bed exhausted and inert. This is stylish and cool but Wong Kar Wai is so terrific he goes the extra mile, he makes his stylish awfully poignant. And I like how he can make his films funny without breaking up the tone, without the movie making it seem like it's stopping in its tracks to relieve tension, it's all part of the journey.As with previous films, Fallen Angels tells us a vibrant expressionist story of lonely souls aching for connection, now when the normal folks go to bed the movie's characters crawl out of their holes to call out in the dead of night to anyone who might listen, even those who won't, each character only a moment's stop in another's journey through life. It is frantic, in a constant flux and motion and search for something, as though driven by instinctive Bedouin locomotion. The movie is motioning towards a sense of destination, a warm place those characters can call home and finally rest in, but it starts and finishes before that destination can be reached, hanging in the existential middle like the blurry snapshot of something that moves. The snapshot here is not simply the memento of something come and gone, it's something to be celebrated for its own momentary fleeting beauty. They might go on to reach home or not, but a girl is riding on a motorbike with a man she doesn't know, she knows the road is not that long and that she'll be getting off soon but at that moment she feels good. Then the movie comes out of a tunnel into the break of dawn, and it would be years (maybe not until Mann's Collateral) before we'd get another movie that takes us on a ride like this through the electric night.

sljohnson12 Beneath the seemingly superfluous violence, cool imagery and stage persona inherent within Wong Kar Wai, lies a deep character study between five people: A hit-man and his partner, an old classmate of the hit-man, and a mute with an eccentric woman. However, like the previous film that was supposed to be included with Fallen Angels, titled Chungking Express, what the director is more than likely intending is a clever romance film, despite the former being of much more traditional standards.This film is recommended for those who like the concept and genre of hit-man films, though by no means does this fall in the cookie cutter cliché of such better known films as The Godfather, Goodfellas, The Professional, and The Untouchables. While not mainly focused on the actual killings performed, the relationships are where the real substance lies.With amazing cinematography (as should be expected by Wai) and a soundtrack that adds to the flavor and ambiance of the film, fans of Hong Kong cinema, foreign cinema, and even those who have never been exposed to this niche within films, will more than likely enjoy it.| Plot 7.8/10 - While not extremely gripping, the plot adds as a vehicle to move the story along. | | Script 9/10 - Filled with mildly humorous | dialogue, the meat of the script lies in character interaction and occasional philosophical contemplations upon the human condition. | | Characterization - 9.8/10 The characters, as Wai is wont to establish, are eccentric and memorable. | Soundtrack 8/10 - A stellar soundtrack, used well in conjunction with the cinematography. Some songs are used to establish themes, which is always effective though rarely used in the majority of films | | Cinematography 9.9/10 - Simply amazing, colourful and aesthetically pleasing, the cinematography helps in enmeshing the viewer and also in building the already stellar development of characters. | Overall 9.2/10 - An enjoyable film. Fans of his work have absolutely nothing to lose! Score not based on average of hitherto listed scores. |

DICK STEEL I've got a strange affinity with Wong Kar-wai's movies, and they seem to somehow present themselves in reverse order to me, where often I find myself visiting his earlier works backwards. Like watching 2046 first before In the Mood for Love, or right now, watching Fallen Angels before Chungking Express, where I have both movies on DVDs sitting on the shelves, but decide to pick Angels before Chungking, knowing jolly well that this one came after, and was like the film that expanded itself so much that it had to break away and stand alone on its own two feet.Deciding between Chungking Express and Fallen Angels also boiled down to pure laziness on my part to want to pop a Region Free DVD into my default player, hence the latter. And I can't help but to chuckle at how Leon Lai's killer character Wong Chi Ming paralleled this laziness of mine, in wanting things on a sliver platter, of getting the preparation work all set out for him, and he just enters the scene with his swagger as the executioner. And the woman behind him acting as his agent and cleaning lady, is played by Michelle Reis.As his agent, she gets the contracts, does the legwork to draw up plans, and with time as she hangs out at his apartment to clean it up, she nurses an aching heart, knowing that perhaps in their profession, to fall in love would spell doom. And it doesn't take one too long to identify with such longing, of being so near yet so far, and she exorcises her unrequited passion by either visiting the places he visits just to hang on to his lingering presence long after he's gone, or by pleasuring herself on his bed. Kinda kinky, don't you think?While Chungking Express dealt with the relationship issues that two cops had to experience (from my fuzzy knowledge of it anyway), Fallen Angels seemed to be its evil twin, again dealing with relations of the heart, but now from the viewpoints centered on two criminals, one in Lai's character, and here the other in Takeshi Kaneshiro (who was also in Chungking Express) with his mute He Zhiwu, who breaks into shops and plays plenty of make belief. In his story arc, his unrequited love stems from his chance encounter with Charlie Young's Charlie, who too suffers a broken heart, but goes over the bend. In fact, I would have thought that Eating Air took a huge leaf out of certain aspects of their courtship, especially with the lovers on a bike careening through Hong Kong's underground highways. And Charlie Young I thought did substantially more than the flower vase roles she's more famous for perfecting.While Zhiwu can't speak, it is perhaps this arc that has a lot to say about love in classic WKW pathos. We listen in to the thoughts of Zhiwu as he narrates them in Mandarin voiceovers, such as topics of relationships having their expiration date, and the keeping of someone's memory alive. With Chi-Ming, he consciously rejects someone who takes an extreme liking of him, to go for a random, temporary lover in the form of Karen Mok's Blondie, who again might be another throwback to a similar character back in Chungking Express. But being cautionary here, is yet again the tale of not incurring the wrath of the wrong woman, though I chose to interpret the events in his story thereafter as being one of a set up, or a fix, versus just being a case of coincidental bad luck.And you cannot get away with not talking about frequent WKW collaborator Christopher Doyle's cinematography in this film, with its obtuse angles like a fish eye twitching all around with plenty of kinetic energy, boasting of shots within shots with its use of captured mirror images. Time lapse also gets used quite frequently, giving it a sense of broad fast forwarding motion, with the devil in the details treated quite casually. With a variation of Massive Attack's Karma Coma by Roel Garcia featured in an eclectic soundtrack, it already bowled me over with its collection of songs featured, whereLove stories that don't go anywhere except to serve as personal reminders, familiar pathos as presented by WKW, a star studded cast and excellent visuals and music, easily make this film one of my firm favourites. I suppose I shouldn't waste too much time before embarking on my journey onboard the more illustrious Chungking Express.

crossbow0106 Wong Kar-Wei is an acclaimed film director, with many incredible films to his credit, such as "Chungking Express", "In The Mood For Love" and "2046", amongst others. This story is mainly about Ming. a hired killer who tires of the game. This stylish film is set at night, and its sinister overtones are effective. Hong Kong has never looked this forbidding. That being said, to me, its not one of Kar-Wei's essential works. You are not supposed to like Ming, but you are also supposed to care about him as the main character, and I don't. By the end, I grew kind of tired with the style of the film, possibly too much of a good thing. By all means see it, but just know that there are veritable classics Mr. War-Kei has done. While good, the film doesn't reach that platitude.