Hong Kong becomes a violent refugee camp/playhouse in another chapter of Soi Cheang’s attempt to turn the city into a large house of horrors. His deeply conflicted feelings about his adopted home town are fully apparent in this violent travelogue. Cheang’s appropriation of Hong Kong cinema’s beloved double theme for a truly repulsive presentation makes Dog Bite Dog one of his most pointed efforts.
Dog Bite Dog makes a mockery of most films that claim to be dark and true to ugliest aspect of human nature as if Soi Cheang is saying here is what true ugliness looks like. There’s very little redeeming factor here even the romance comes wrapped around some disturbing scenes and the intimation that our leading lady (Pei Pei) is willing to lose a limb to gangrene by sticking for her man. The man in question is hired assassin Edison Chen a silent killing machine living a pile of bodies on his way out of the country while being pursued by cop Sam Lee that is taking this job a bit to serious for his sanity.
The bullets fly but none of usual doppelganger honor one expects of such premises just two dueling monsters and a lot of collateral carnage between them. What emerges is the idea that we are in wayward place better suited to human dogs like the two violent lead characters. Dog Bite Dog presents itself as escape point where lost souls can finally met and fulfill their violent promises. Everyone here is a symbolic refugee (that Chen’s character is a Cambodian just literalizes the idea). Their real place is the mean and ugly violence Dog Bite Dog allows them to deliver.
Cheang keeps Dog Bite Dog complete uncompromising which is impressive at first and a bit less later, thanks to a last act that takes the film’s core ideas to an over the top extreme that gets close to laughable. Soi Cheang remains essentially an horror director and this is truly a nihilist dark horror film about human basic moral bankruptcy disguised as a cops and killers potboiler. One can’t stop admire Cheang’s for his conviction even the worst moments in Dog Bite Dog betray a total single handed devotion to its ugly word view. It is a truly harrowing experience which at its best turns such a commitment to show the city as tormented crux of violent bodies into poetics of horror. No surprise it loses something when it leaves locale behind, without Cheang’s attraction/repulsionto Hong Kong’s, Dog Bite Dog’s questions turn into less imposing abstraction.
A Chinese Feast 