With a flurry of bullets, fists and fluttering white doves, John Woo offers a better yesterday: it’s a raucously enjoyable return to the action-thriller style of his pre-Hollywood years, a cheerfully cartoony ass-kicking bromance between tough cop and falsely accused murder suspect in the manner of his classics like The Killer. There are parkour-style action sequences in crowded streets, snipers whose gun barrels emerge from billboard hoardings, cheesy emotional freeze-frames on expressive faces, a jazzy-melancholy sax theme, a scene in the subway which involves actually running on the tracks ahead of the train, and an old-fashioned jet-ski chase down a city river.

The film is based on the Japanese pulp novel Hot Pursuit by Juko Nishimura, and particularly its cult 1976 movie adaptation starring the much-admired Ken Takakura (who played a yakuza in Ridley Scott’s Black Rain, among many other credits), who died in 2014 and to whose memory John Woo has offered this remake in homage.

The original was about a cop who goes on the run after being fitted up on a corruption charge; Woo now makes him a maverick lawyer and also makes him Chinese – perhaps in tribute to the original movie’s colossal popularity in China. It is set in Osaka, where Du Qiu, played by Hanyu Zhang, is a Chinese-born lawyer who has just quit his job as a top-ranking consigliere to hatchet-faced big pharma boss Sakai (played by another Japanese icon, Jun Kunimura) and his creepy, deadbeat son Hiroshi (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi). Sakai suspects this man knows rather too much about the firm’s shady dealings and needs to have him taken out. He already employs two contract killers, both addicted to the company’s PCP-style product: Dawn (Angeles Woo, daughter of John) and Rain (Ha Ji-won), who uncork a ferocious slaying at the top of the movie. Rain meets and slightly falls for Du Qui as they banter knowingly about old films.

Long arm of the law … Masaharu Fukuyama

Du Qui is framed for murder when he wakes from a drugged sleep to find a dead woman in bed next to him. He goes on the run, and two officers are on his trail: Yamura, played by Masaharu Fukuyama (also to be seen here in Toronto in The Third Murder) and his wide-eyed partner, Rika, nicely played by Nanami Sakuraba. But there is someone else taking an interest in Du Qiu – a mysteriously flirtatious woman (Stephy Qi) who is the widow of a scientist employed by the corporation, a man driven to anguish by the hideous properties of the top-secret drug he was forced to develop.

It is this woman’s backstory that offers the most uproarious and surreal moments. Her late husband’s death coincided, in the most macabre way, with their wedding and, like an action-movie Miss Havisham, she now keeps her bloodstained white gown in a shrine-like room.

Manhunt zooms and crashes along like a stick-shift car, with Woo at the wheel careening between action set pieces, broad comedy, champagne-swilling party scenes, flashbacks and swoony emotional moments. Of course it is a little absurd, and audiences are entitled to ask how Du Qui has not been implicated in Sakai’s drug conspiracy, especially as the bad guy clearly thinks that his lawyer knows enough to require taking out. But this film offers something that is never in sufficiently plentiful supply: fun.