From Riches to Rags
- -Ricky and Fatso are friends in need. They are in dire need of money since they are only paid slave wages at the bottling factory. However, they become millionaires overnight after buying a winning lottery ticket. During one of their swingin' nights on the town, Ricky is suddenly attacked by an upset stomach; and in no time, a quack doctor diagnoses the seizure as terminal cancer. Ricky seriously considers suicide. But he is appalled by the drawbacks inherent in the available methods of doing himself in--primarily the pain! It is on a rooftop from which he is supposed to make a plunge that he saves a poor man from suicide by giving the latter all the money he has. In gratitude, the newly rich man promises to hire a killer to finish off his suffering benefactor...
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In one of John Woo’s best-loved comedies, deadpan Ricky Hui is a working stiff who wins big at the races, only to be told by a doctor that he is terminally ill.
Unable to cope with his illness, he hires an assassin to kill him, and then finds out that the doctor was mistaken. With no way to call off the killer, Hui goes on a mad run for his life, culminating in a showdown with the assassin at a mental asylum. Like many of Woo’s comedies, From Riches to Ragsis dark and almost surreal; and, in a foreshadowing of Woo’s Bullet in the Head, the movie appropriates the Russian roulette sequence from The Deer Hunter.
Barry Long
Thanks to Far East Film Festival