Woo and Tsui famously tangled over the direction this would take, but it's legitimately difficult to tell who had the most control. You could easily see, for instance, a pivotal character's death being tied to a barely glimpsed shooting star as the product of either filmmaker. Either way this is a narrative and tonal mess, with silly twin-brother plot twists and huge chunks of time given over to poor Dean Shek literally frothing at the mouth.

All of that's rendered kind of irrelevant by the truly majestic shootout that concludes this movie, an all-time classic of sustained heroic bloodshedding. Woo drains out most of the sound save for grunts and gunshots, and it's here that his now-trademark slow-fast-slow juxtapositions of cuts really take hold. If it lacks the grace of his later work, that's more than compensated for by pure chaotic brutality. It's closer to the lizard brain anarchy of HEROES SHED NO TEARS.

A side note: I took an African-American Cinema class at Penn State taught by the cop in the infamous "Eat the fucking rice!" scene, Charles Dumas. When I asked him about it, he said he never even saw the movie.