The Odd One Dies

The Odd One Dies (两个只能活一个) is a 1997 Hong Kong crime comedy-drama directed by Patrick Yau, written by Wai Ka-Fai, and produced by Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai for the studio Milkyway Image, starring Takeshi Kaneshiro and Carman Lee as two contract killers who fall in love while one tries to hire the other to take over his murder contract.¹ It is generally identified as the first film released by Milkyway Image, the company founded in 1996 by To and Wai Ka-Fai that became one of the defining production houses of late-1990s Hong Kong cinema.^{2 • 3}

Production and Milkyway Image

Milkyway Image was founded in 1996 by Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai, with figures such as Patrick Yau and Yau Nai-hoi taking roles as directors and writers within a system of collective creation and internal apprenticeship.³ The company's early period, from 1996 to 1999, established its signature dark, experimental style before its commercial breakthrough with Running Out of Time (1999) and Needing You (2000).^{3 • 6} The Odd One Dies was the company's first release, followed in the same year by Wai Ka-Fai's Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 and The Terrorist.^{2 • 3}

Who directed it. The film is credited to Patrick Yau, who had been an assistant director to Johnnie To. A widely repeated account holds that a trio of films credited to Yau, The Odd One Dies, The Longest Nite, and Expect the Unexpected, were in fact almost solely the work of To and Wai Ka-Fai, with To and Wai later acknowledging that they directed all but about three scenes of Expect the Unexpected.¹⁰ Other reviewers treat the attribution differently for this title: one writes that on The Odd One Dies Yau probably did actually direct, rather than having To step in as is said to have happened on The Longest Nite and Expect the Unexpected.² A Letterboxd reviewer notes that the film has sometimes been listed with To as co-director but is currently credited to Yau alone.¹¹

Style

The film works in a register influenced by Wong Kar-wai's mid-1990s films while departing from them. The Taiwanese film database atmovies describes director Patrick Yau's camera work as carrying a strong Wong Kar-wai shadow, while the character design and atmosphere add a postmodern sense of the absurd, with romantic and humorous scenes throughout.⁹ Critics have called it a tender inversion of Wong Kar-wai's familiar tropes rather than an imitation.¹⁰

Raymond Wong Ying-Wah's synth-tango score has been compared to the musical direction of Wong Kar-wai's Days of Being Wild, with a main theme described as more infectious and deliberately kitsch.¹⁰ Audience commentary on Rotten Tomatoes highlights the warm cinematography and the use of cha-cha tracks that give scenes a detached irony.⁵ Despite the gangster setting, the film contains little action in the heroic bloodshed mode; its comedy is dark, and it shares with Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 a notable amount of severed fingers among triad characters.¹ The German review at artechock describes the film's understated moments in which the genre's spiral of violence is broken by small gestures of humanity, and reads the story, set in Hong Kong at the turn of 1997, as carrying a clear political dimension while also functioning on a universal level.¹²

Place in 1997 Hong Kong cinema

The film appeared at the moment of Hong Kong's 1997 handover to China, and critics have read Milkyway's 1997 output as engaging with that event. A Taiwanese film journal article groups The Odd One Dies with Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 and The Terrorist as the films that established Milkyway's signature style, noting that all three deal with the Hong Kong "1997 complex" and present characters searching for a way out, a fatalism beyond their control, and a fear of having one's identity replaced by another's; the critic Pu Feng wrote that year that the three films contained pointed 1997 allegory while retaining the pessimism about China and Hong Kong that followed 1989.³ A Hong Kong media retrospective similarly lists The Odd One Dies among 1997 films whose fatalistic sense of powerlessness carried political meaning about the handover.¹³ A survey of Hong Kong black-film characteristics of 1997 to 2001 places it among the period's representative noir-tinged crime films, alongside Too Many Ways to Be No. 1, Full Alert, and Beast Cops.¹⁴

Reception

The film was not a commercial success; Milkyway's early films struggled at the box office before the company's later hits.⁶ Its awards recognition was limited to the Hong Kong Film Award nomination for Best Costume & Make Up Design for Silver Cheung.⁶ On review aggregators it holds an IMDb rating of 6.6 from 667 votes⁷ and a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer of 65% based on a single critic review, with a Popcornmeter of more than 50 audience ratings.⁵ Douban users rate it 7.8 out of 10.¹⁵ Retrospective commentary has treated it as an overlooked early Milkyway work, with one reviewer calling it undeserving of its obscurity and another describing it as a formative example of the company's house style of dry black humor and visual storytelling.^{5 • 2} The film remains available on home video and streaming, including a Mei Ah DVD in an approximately 1.66:1 aspect ratio and streaming on Amazon Prime Video in Germany.^{6 • 7}

References

1. Odd One Dies, The (1997) Review, cityonfire.com
2. The Odd One Dies, The 14 Amazons
3. 「後九七」論述場的連枝：重讀「銀河映像」電影, 放映週報 (Funscreen), No. 657, 2019
4. The Odd One Dies (1997), Letterboxd releases page
5. The Odd One Dies, Rotten Tomatoes
6. The Odd One Dies (1997), sogoodreviews.com
7. The Odd One Dies (1997), JustWatch (Germany)
8. 两个只能活一个 (1997), iQIYI
9. 兩個只能活一個, 開眼電影網 atmovies
10. The Odd One Dies, Soiled Sinema (wiki.chadnet.org PDF)
11. The Odd One Dies review by Georgedcc, Letterboxd
12. The Odd One Dies (HK 1997), artechock Kritik, Thomas Willmann
13. 〔回歸廿年〕不只絕望無力　三部97年港產片的九七複雜情緒, HK01
14. 1997－2001年香港黑色警匪電影巡禮, 每日頭條
15. 金城武最經典的一部電影，被忽視了整整22年！, 每日頭條

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1990s films › Crime comedies and capers

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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