Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 (一个字头的诞生)

Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 (一个字头的诞生) is a 1997 Hong Kong action comedy directed by Wai Ka-fai (韦家辉) that follows a small-time triad through two diverging versions of his life after a fortune teller predicts a fateful choice. Produced by Johnnie To, it was the debut film of Milkyway Image, the production company Wai and To co-founded in 1996, and it established the fatalistic, formally experimental style for which the company became known.^{1 • 2}

Production and Milkyway Image's debut

Wai Ka-fai, born in Hong Kong in 1962, had worked in television at TVB and ATV before moving into film screenwriting and directing his first feature, Peace Hotel (1995), at the invitation of Chow Yun-fat. In 1996 he co-founded Milkyway Image (Hong Kong) Limited with Johnnie To, his long-time production partner, and directed the company's debut with Too Many Ways to Be No. 1, co-written with Matt Chow and Szeto Kam-yuen.¹

According to an interview Wai gave for the book Milkyway Image, Beyond Imagination, the film began as a sudden idea in his head, at first existing only as a line of text about someone founding a triad. During production, Wai and To, both young directors with creative freedom, kept adding improvised ideas and let the story drift toward the unorthodox; Wai recalled that with so many directors making films, they deliberately wanted their work to be a little different.^{5 • 7}

The film appeared amid the Young and Dangerous craze, a glamorized comic-book triad series that spawned sequels, prequels, spin-offs, and imitations through 1996. Subway Cinema notes that Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 was initially taken as a response to that phenomenon, but Wai had in fact been developing it for several years beforehand; in his film, being a gangster is just a job, and there are no heroes.⁶

Style and narrative structure

The film's structure shows the same events branching into different outcomes depending on small decisions, a repeating narrative that Chinese criticism has compared to the forking paths of Jorge Luis Borges. The Phoenix Entertainment retrospective notes that Run Lola Run, often credited with popularizing this structure, completed the same challenge two years later.⁵ IMDb's plot summary likewise identifies inspiration from Krzysztof Kieślowski and Quentin Tarantino, and a Letterboxd reviewer draws the comparison to Kieślowski's Blind Chance directly.^{8 • 9}

Visually, the film relies heavily on wide-angle and 9.8mm fisheye lenses with handheld cameras, long takes, and interlocking blue and dark-red tones, so that characters seem like out-of-focus clowns in the swaying frame.^{2 • 5} The Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute describes the result as an anarchic, genre-defying voice, with Wai's idea that "character determines choice, and choice shapes fate" producing a chaotic anarchy that serves as a distinctive footnote to pre-handover Hong Kong.² Subway Cinema describes the film as structured like a religion, a Buddhist universe of branching paths in which characters are reincarnated again and again, and notes Wai's debt to Takeshi Kitano.⁶

Reception

Commercially the film failed: it earned about HK$3 million at the Hong Kong box office, a poor return that the News Lens attributes to its unconventionality at a time when Hong Kong film output was already declining in 1996 and 1997.^{4 • 7} Critically, however, it was recognized: nominations at the Hong Kong Film Awards for screenplay, cinematography, and original score, a Film of Merit from the Hong Kong Film Critics Society, and Golden Bauhinia Awards for Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor, and a Top 10 Chinese Films placement.² Subway Cinema reports that numerous Hong Kong critics deemed it the most important film of 1997.⁶

The film has also been read as political commentary. IMDb's summary calls it a highly evaluated commentary on Hong Kong's 1997 transition to the People's Republic of China,⁸ and the Phoenix retrospective describes it as a comic allegory of Hong Kong's 1997 political choice, made as Hong Kongers faced the handover with anxiety.⁵ Its reputation has grown with time: the Hong Kong Film Archive's filmmaker profile records that the film's multiple-endings structure was a brand-new attempt to subvert the narrative tradition of Hong Kong gangster cinema, and that Wai's subsequent works The Odd One Dies (1997) and The Longest Nite (1998) built on it to redefine the genre and establish Milkyway Image's style.¹

References

1. WAI Ka-fai, Hong Kong Filmmakers Search, Hong Kong Film Archive
2. 一個字頭的誕生 program page, Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI)
3. Too Many Ways To Be Number One, cityonfire.com
4. 一个字头的诞生, 360百科
5. 百部穿影黑帮篇08：《一个字头的诞生》, 凤凰网娱乐
6. Too Many Ways To Be No. 1, Subway Cinema
7. 港片小酌《一個字頭的誕生》：以破格和鮮明定義作者之必要, The News Lens
8. Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 (1997) Plot, IMDb
9. Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 (1997), Letterboxd
10. 一個字頭的誕生 TOO MANY WAYS TO BE NO.1, 開眼電影網

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

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