Tamer than the Original

According to one critic, Martin Scorsese apparently wanted this movie to be a lot fresher and more intense than it ended up being. After all, the movie was modeled after a Hong Kong movie that used techniques that were so over the top that they would be way too much for a mainstream American audience. Believe it or not, American audiences are known to be some of the tamest and most easily offended in all the world, especially compared with some European and Asian audiences.

Scorsese wanted something very intense and gritty, and he wanted Michael Bauhaus, the movie's director of photography, to mimic the style of the Asian original. But Bauhaus had other ideas. "In the end," he said, "I had to pull back a bit from those wilder styles; I couldn't go that far with this movie."

For some people, this was an unfortunate compromise. For others, it was the right thing to do because it made the movie enjoyable for people who couldn't have handled the violence and darkness of the Hong Kong version of the movie. If you end up watching both, we're happy to leave this call up to you.