ABSTRACT
The Chinese characteristics of the revolutionary Western Let the Bullets Fly/Rang zidan fei (2010) is the most fascinating work in the cycle of Asian Westerns that began with Tears of the Black Tiger and continued with Sukiyaki Western Django and The Good, The Bad, The Weird-all subjects of our previous chapters. Like all these films, Let the Bullets Fly maintains the Asian strain of affectionate tribute to the Spaghetti Western and its subversive reworking and revisionism of the conventions of the classical Hollywood Western. The Chinese film picks up a thread from The Good, The Bad, The Weird, which is the use of a good/bad/ugly trinary opposition that is now recognised as a counterintuitive response to the good/bad binary of the conventional Hollywood Western. Let the Bullets Fly utilises this trinary structure within the form of the revolutionary Western. Part of its fascination lies in this distinction while the other half lies in its rich reserves of material for allegorical readings; and it will be our task in this chapter to examine the film’s credentials as a revolutionary Western and the intricacies of its political allegory (making it a revolutionary Western with Chinese characteristics). Let the Bullets Fly therefore marks the high point of the cycle of Asian Westerns signifying the resurgence of the genre in Asian cinemas as well as in other international cinemas (I see a work such as Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained [2012] as being influenced by this Asian Western resurgence-a point that I will expand on when I discuss the film in chapter 7).
