Fulltime Killer (全職殺手) is an 2001 film out of Hong Kong. The movie stars Andy Lau, Takashi Sorimachi, and Kelly Lin. The supporting cast include Cherrie Ying, Lam Suet, and Simon Yam.
Tok is a very flamboyant assassin that likes to put on a show while he's taking out his targets. O is the top assassin in all of Asia and does things efficiently. When Tok sets his sights on becoming the number one assassin in all of Asia, he starts to infiltrate O's life. Tok looks to Chin, a Taiwanese transplant in Hong Kong who knows Japanese very well. When Tok and Chin get more serious, O starts to react. At the end, they must decide who's the number one assassin in all the land.
This movie was a breathe of fresh air when I first saw it back in 2002. I hadn't seen it right after it's released in 2001, but in 2002 while I was catching up. At that point, the catching was really sad due to overall quality of HK cinema taking a dive. There were gems of the lot, but the majority was mediocre to bad. Fulltime Killer stood out among the rest for its premise, pretty awesome acting from Andy, and great style. Andy was already an HK box office star, but his proved it during a dark time in HK cinema. He carried films all by himself. Fulltime Killer was among one of them.
The way the story ran also gave us great stories to follow as there was interpol chasing O across Thailand, to Japan, and finally to Hong Kong. There was a fair amount of English in the film. Basically letting Kelly Lin and Cherry Ying do their thing having both come from the US of A. Kelly after UCI and Cherry straight after High School.
I have this as one of my top 10 films of the aughts/two thousands. I recently rented it from Netflix again. It was all that and more. You should make it part of your Hong Kong movie viewing pleasure.
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