The anti-romantic solemnity of Johnnie To’s last movie, Election 2 (a.k.a Triad Election) is as abandoned in the director’s latest film Exiled for a kind of nostalgic action grandeur as the stasis of its prequel, 1999’s The Mission, is abandoned for constant flight and firefights. Exiled picks up with The Mission’s gang of bodyguards reluctantly reconvening to carry out a hit on one of their own, who took a shot at the understandably vengeful Boss Fay (Simon Yam, who also played the boss in Election). The most ardent of the hitmen (Anthony Wong) nearly guns the man down in front of his wife and newborn child in a sequence as heavily weighted with showdown self-importance as it is kinetic with flying doors and mistakes-almost made. Luckily, the appeals of the more understanding members of the crew, as well as the heavy-handed sentiment of the cloying family lead the group to a nostalgic evening of food and laughter before they all peal off to perform that one last mission to send the marked target, Wo (Nick Cheung), and his family far away to a safe and secure future.

Really, though, the plot of Exiled is not of much importance. In the manner familiar to most viewers of classical Hollywood auteurs, To’s cinema more often than not is about how the director assembles his picture rather than the specifics of a given narrative. (There are always exceptions; part of the satisfaction of Election 2 came from an unusually expressive script.) Exiled, it must be admitted, is an all-too familiar scenario of posturing gangster professionals bound to fatalistic paths wherein their lives of violence doom them just as their codes of ethics ennoble them. So what is so special here? Well, for one, To has moved well beyond the parody of the John Woo school of grandiose male melodrama action cinema he scathingly exhibited in A Hero Never Dies (1998). It may come as a shock after the resolutely anti-romantic Election 2 that Exiled’s first scene is of stoic, trenchcoat-clad men in paramilitary coiffures flicking cigar ash and silently waiting the arrival of their target photographed in stately crane shots and Kurosawa-style widescreen blocking. And while the film certainly indulges in such out-dated hoodlum glorification, To treats it with a gentle humor, using a harmonica theme ripped almost straight out of Morricone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, exaggeratedly boyish liveliness of the gang, a random sojourn trek through the desert, and other playful quasi-jokes to keep the audience well aware of the filmmaker’s acknowledgment of the film’s fantasy of these men and their world. It is a bit nostalgic, knowing as it does that the cinema that could take these stylish men completely seriously perhaps no longer exists, but To has wisely moved beyond mockery and into a more integrated, self-aware tone. If he is going to go back to these standards for entertainment, it is going to be done with a full acknowledgment of the bankruptcy of the caricatures and of their on-screen glory, even when the film whole-heartedly does what it can to give them their magnificent worth.

And Exiled certainly does give them their worth. While The Mission, like the director’s later film P.T.U. was a study of the uneventfulness of the gangster lifestyle, this sequel keeps the gang moving and fighting as often as possible. The M.O. is for the gang to end up in an untenable situation of betrayal within an unusual space—Wo’s empty apartment, a circular, conservatory-like restaurant, an underground clinic cloaked in billowing curtains, an open hotel lobby—and to extricate themselves violently. To’s men, whose dialog is often nothing but clichés, shoot their guns like they are personal statements. The fight choreography here is not the Woo ballet or even The Mission’s mannered statue-poses, but rather a kind of choreographed convolution. More often than not the visual field is confused by spinning bodies, flapping curtains, dusty and bloody squib explosions, and overhead shots that only serve to highlight the swirling, delirious nature of the gunfights. No one important ever seems to die in these fights (more than ever, it is always the henchmen; the gang and the rival boss are always injured but make it out), and instead the trigger pulls seem to be a kind of lifestyle translation of having the last laugh or the last line—the men making their point bluntly expressed. Here, it is the desire for the gang to become exiles, to leave the criminal world and its vengeance, vendettas, and bad blood behind, and retreat to the nostalgic comradery of their group’s past. This lends a passion to the proceedings obviously absent from The Mission’s cold, professional centerpiece shoot out, and To employs the best action choreography seen in some time to underscore the force of feeling—mainly in keeping their brotherhood together—these hoodlums are channeling through their professionalism. There is some poignancy here and there amidst the entertainment, and mostly far away from the cloying attitude towards Wo’s wife and child, as well as the gang’s own ridiculous playfulness. It is in the gang’s flippant attitude towards their future after a friend dies, flipping coins with indifference to determine what to do next; it is, in the film’s most unexpectedly touching scene, in the brief resurrection of the friend to point out the right direction for our wayward gangsters to head; it is in the only gunfight that goes wrong and To superbly shifts tone as well as spatial direction to move from giddy gun convolution to the dead serious, impotent stasis of the battle. And it is most definitely and most sadly in this self-defeating occupation of gangster that forces one to only speak at their most heartfelt and most effectively through the weapon in their hand.