Their very rivalry bonds them, and makes the working-out of their relationship the center of the film and the engine that drives the action. The high stakes of money, bio-terrorism and erotic possession of the only woman in the film are all secondary to the violence that binds two almost perfectly matched men. They fight and die in a homosocial fantasy where women exist only to be shared by rivals and to betray the unwary, where your worst enemy could have been your best friend, and the glowering villain peels off the smiling hero's face. What's really important is that they are not girls, that they are not sissies, that they are not boring grownups. Woo plays with that fiction, casting his hero and villain as polar opposites who have far too much in common for mere coincidence, who desperately desire the same woman, the same virus, the same gun, and who, at the moment of truth, fly through the air into each other's arms as the world explodes around them.
Fulfillment is in violence.
Violence is the force which both brings men together and gives them the excuse and the means to deny their intimate connection. In the same way that pornographic films use sex to tell stories of men's power, action films use violence to play out the dynamics of male bonding, exclusion and dominance. Back to Vol.