From the get-go, it probably should be noted that this review of The Head Hunter is based on the Mei Ah DVD, which has been retitled to The Long Goodbye, trimmed by some thirteen minutes from its' theatrical edit, and overdubbed -- to the point of including a Cantopop cover of "Take My Breath Away", a song released several years later -- all in order to incorporate the original story's new trajectory, the details of which will be delved into at later points.

Keeping that in mind, the story centers on Vietnamese immigrant Lik (Chow Yun-Fat), who works on movie sets as a special effects tech during the day, and moonlights as an assassin. In a move I'm sure no one would be able to see coming, he falls for Vickie (Rosamund Kwan in her film debut), a TV reporter and the daughter of one of his victims, which makes Lik want to put away his guns. Of course, that doesn't sit well with his employers, so bloodshed ensues.

In its' original form, The Head Hunter had Lik and Vickie meeting through an investigation she is doing about chemical weapons (apparently the film studio Lik works for also makes them on the side) and a fairly large amount of political subtext, as the people Lik is killing are US and USSR covert operatives. The Long Goodbye edit removes most of these elements (though strangely still keeping in a scene where Vicky is interviewing victims of a gas leak) and goes for more of a straight-forward approach to deliver low-budget visceral thrills, going so far as to actually extend a couple of violent scenes that were trimmed for the initial release.

At any rate, if the other reviews for this movie displayed online are any indication, despite which version you're watching, The Head Hunter is not a very compelling or exciting movie. At this point of his film career, Chow Yun-Fat had shown signs of brilliance (as he did with the previous year's The Story of Woo Viet) but most times found himself shoehorned into generic genre potboilers such as this one. There's nothing greatly going on wrong here, but really, only major Chow Yun-Fat fans will much (if anything) to truly savor.

Director Lau Shing-Hon (who only made one movie before this and didn't step behind the lens again until 1999) seems to be unable to find his footing. In some instances, he's firmly capable in his gritty delivery of casual yet brutal violence, invoking a whiff of the more talented "new wave" directors like Ringo Lam that were making a name for themselves in Hong Kong at this time. But then, more times than not, Lau oversteps his comfort zone with dramatic scenes that look like they were pulled from a soap opera's B-reel.

RATING: 5

Note: there seems to be no Chinese-language/English-subtitled home video version of The Head Hunter in print at this time of writing (March 2011), with the last available outlet being a Tai Seng VHS tape. An English dubbed cut is fairly widely available in the US via various DVD sets put out by gray market labels such as Millcreek. More information about the differences between the edits can be found at Hong Kong Digital.