The Hong Kong Film Corner – THE MISSION (1999), directed by Johnnie To!

Posted on July 12, 2025 by Bradley Crain

*(Bottom to Top) Francis Ng, Roy Cheung, Lam Suet, and Anthony Wong!*

THE MISSION is the 1999 film that helped me fall back in love with Hong Kong cinema after many of its great actors and directors had left for Hollywood in the mid 90’s. With Chow Yun-Fat, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and John Woo no longer working in Hong Kong, there was a huge void, and Director Johnnie To stepped in and helped fill it with some of the best Hong Kong crime films ever made. Through his Milkyway Image production company, To directed THE LONGEST NITE (1998), EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED (1998), A HERO NEVER DIES (1998), RUNNING OUT OF TIME (1999), ELECTION (2005), and MAD DETECTIVE (2007), to name a few, all of which are crime film masterpieces in my opinion, and feature some of the best actors still working in Hong Kong at that time. I put Johnnie To’s body of work up against the best directors working anywhere in the world in the last 40 years. The quality and volume of his movies are outstanding, and they’re prime to be discovered for the uninitiated!

THE MISSION has a relatively simple plot…five bodyguards are assembled to protect Hong Kong triad boss, Lung (Eddy Ko), after assassins try to take him out while he’s having dinner at the Super Bowl restaurant. Lung’s brother, Frank (Simon Yam), puts together quite the badass group: Curtis (Anthony Wong), a completely trusted former associate who’s now working as a hairdresser; James (Lam Suet), a firearms expert and nonstop eater of pistachios; Roy (Francis Ng), a super busy guy who seems to be rising in the ranks as a local criminal leader; Shin (Jackie Lui), Roy’s underling and the inexperienced, weak link of the team; and Mike (Roy Cheung), a guy who’s awesome with a gun and currently stuck in the pimp game. We follow this group as they protect their boss from repeated attempts on his life, and also try to help figure out who’s ordered the hits. Needless to say, their mission takes a few detours along the way, and the men will ultimately have to decide where their true loyalty lies!

THE MISSION is a crime film masterpiece, and I give Johnnie To most of the credit. Clocking in at just 84 minutes, the film is so simple, and yet it creates such a distinctive vibe that you can’t take your eyes off of the screen. To seems most interested in building the relationships between his main characters during the boring downtimes of their mission. We see them go from not talking to each other, to begrudgingly acknowledging each other, to finally playing soccer with a paper ball as they wait for their boss to leave his office. Just as we’re really getting to know and like our characters, the film will spring an intense action sequence out of nowhere. The director’s signature restraint is on full display in these limited action scenes, which are built around our characters’ professional expertise and a rising spacial tension with the would-be assassins. The action is incredible without relying on the over the top action sequences expected of the genre. As a matter of fact, I rank the “mall shootout” from THE MISSION as one of the best action scenes that Hong Kong cinema has to offer.

*The cool poster for THE MISSION (1999)*

The writing is also top notch in THE MISSION, which is not a real surprise because Nai-Hoi Yau has written almost all of Johnnie To’s best films. Yau and To have quite the working relationship as the screenplay, like the movie, hints at way more than it says. The audience isn’t spoon fed everything that happens, but it’s easy to look back upon repeat viewings and see that the clues are there based on what we know of the characters. There are also some interesting surprises sprinkled throughout the film. For example, a character shown as a coward in the opening scene re-emerges later in the film and redeems himself in a completely unexpected way. These moments are fun and exciting even for a film that is often relatively still and quiet. One other technical credit I want to mention is the film’s musical score by Chi Wing Chung. I’m not the kind of reviewer to spend too much time on a score, but I haven’t been able to get THE MISSION’s theme out of my head from the first time I saw it. Like the rest of the film, it’s simple, but it is the perfect synthy, background music for men walking and looking cool. I absolutely love it.

Last, but not least, I have to highlight the cast that Johnnie To assembled for THE MISSION. It’s full of Hong Kong film award winners, beginning with five time winner Anthony Wong, and then Francis Ng and Simon Yam, also single winners of the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor. Each of these guys are outstanding here, with Anthony Wong and Francis Ng as the standouts of the movie. Anthony Wong, known for so many over the top characterizations in the classic Hong Kong films of the 90’s, delivers a perfectly understated and subtle performance here, which makes him that much more powerful when he needs to be. Francis Ng has a lot more dialogue, but his underlying sense of frustration and boiling-over intensity is the perfect counterpoint to Wong’s patience and calm. Roy Cheung, Lam Suet, Eddy Ko, and Tian-Lin Wang (Wong Jing’s dad) are all perfectly cast and bring excellent characterizations to the table. My only complaint about the cast is the fact that Lau Ching-Wan isn’t in the film. He’s been the star of so many of To’s best films, that I wish there would have been a part for him here.

Overall, THE MISSION is an incredible crime drama with a simple plot that primarily focuses on loyalty and betrayal within the triad underworld, punctuated by intense and precise action sequences, and performed by many of the very best actors in the Hong Kong film industry. It gets my highest recommendation and is well worth searching out.

I’ve included a trailer for THE MISSION below. I honestly don’t think it’s a great representation for the movie itself, but it appears to be the best we’ve got!

Song of the Day: The Main Theme From The Mission by Ennio Morricone

Posted on July 12, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s song of the day is the main theme from the 1986 best picture nominee, The Mission. As with all of the songs of the day that I’ve featured this month, this was composed by the great Ennio Morricone.

Previous Entries In Our Tribute To Morricone:

Cannes Film Review: The Mission (dir by Roland Joffe)

Posted on May 19, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

(With this year’s Cannes Film Festival coming to a close, I figured that I would start of today by looking at some previous winners of the Palme d’Or. We start things off with 1986’s The Mission.)

The Mission opens with a man stoically plunging over a waterfall. That man is a priest who, in the 1740s, has been sent to convert the natives of the Paraguayan jungle to Christianity. The natives’ reaction to the priest’s arrival was to tie him to a wooden cross and send him over the falls. It’s an opening that perfectly captures one of the main themes of The Mission: the contrast between the beauty of nature and the savagery of man.

The majority of the film deals with two men. Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) is the Spanish Jesuit who replaces the martyred priest. Father Gabriel is a pacifist who manages to win the trust of the natives through a shared love of music. Gabriel plays the oboe and, when it is snatched away from him, reacts not with anger but with acceptance. With the help of Father John Fielding (Liam Neeson), Father Gabriel builds a mission and works to educate the natives. This brings him into conflict with the local plantation owners, the majority of whom just see the natives as being potential slaves.

That’s where Mendoza (Robert De Niro) comes in. A brutish and violent man, Mendoza makes his living kidnapping natives and selling them into slavery. When Mendoza discovers that his fiancée, Carlotta (Cherie Lunghi), has fallen in love with his younger brother, Felipe (Aidan Quinn), Mendoza snaps and, in a moment of anger, kills his brother. Seeking forgiveness for his violent past, Mendoza travels to Father Gabriel’s mission, dragging all of his armor and weaponry in a bundle behind him. When Mendoza finally reaches the mission, he is not only forgiven by the natives but he also eventually ends up becoming a Jesuit himself.

And, for a while, everything is perfect. That is until the Spanish turn over their land in South America to the Portuguese and the new colonials decide that having a mission around will make it a little bit too difficult to enslave the natives. When Father Gabriel is ordered to close the mission, he refuses to do so. He says that he will stay and that he is willing to be martyred if the Portuguese forces attack. Gabriel believes that violence is a sin against God. Mendoza, on the other hand, announces that he will stay and he is prepared to once again pick up weapons to defend the mission…

Dramatically, The Mission is uneven. While Jeremy Irons and Liam Neeson are both believable and sympathetic as Father Gabriel and Father Fielding and fit right in with the film’s period setting, Robert De Niro seems miscast and out-of-place. As good an actor as De Niro is, he just doesn’t belong in the jungles of South America. Whenever he shows up or speaks, your mind immediately goes to New York City. The film tries to juggle so many theological and political issues that it can get a bit exhausting trying to keep up with it all. Watching the film, it was hard not to wish for a chance to see what a director like Werner Herzog or Terrence Malick would have done with the same material.

That said, The Mission is a visually impressive film, one that captures the beauty, the innocence, and the danger of the jungle. The scenes of both Gabriel and Mendoza climbing the waterfall are stunning to watch and, in the end, the film does have a sincere message about the ongoing fight for the rights of indigenous people. That counts for something.

The Mission received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, though it lost to Platoon. It also won the Palme d’Or, beating out such films as After Hours, Down by Law, Mona Lisa, Runaway Train, and The Sacrifice.

Let’s Second Guess The Academy: Best Picture 1986

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet

Last week, we considered whether or not Out of Africa deserved the title of best picture of 1985. As of this writing, the votes would seem to indicate that most of you feel that it did not.

For this week, let’s jump ahead one year to 1986. According to the Academy, the five best films of the year were:

1) Children of a Lesser God, an adaptation of play about an angry deaf girl and the teacher who falls in love with her,

2) Hannah and Her Sisters, a Woody Allen film about three sisters and the neurotic people they know,

3) The Mission, a film about Jesuit missionaries in South America that also won the Palme d’Or at Cannes,

4) Room With A View, James Ivory’s super romantic adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel,

and finally, the winner,

5) Platoon, Oliver Stone’s autobiographical film about the Viet Nam war.

Unlike Out of Africa, Platoon has remained a fairly respected winner. Still, was Platoon actually the best film of 1986? If I had been a member of the Academy back in 1986, I would have been torn between A Room With A View and Hannah and Her Sisters with my final vote going to Room With A View. How about you?

Now, here comes the fun part. Let’s say that Platoon turned out to be a disaster. Let’s say that Room With A View never made it over to American theaters and maybe Woody Allen decided to retire early. Let’s say that none of the best picture nominees had been eligible to be nominated. Which five films would have nominated in their place?

You can vote for up to five films and yes, write-ins are accepted!

(I voted for Blue Velvet, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty In Pink, Betty Blue, and Something Wild.)