Johnnie To’s Three Receives Tense New Trailer Ahead of its Non-Theatrical Release

The most recent film from the insanely prolific Hong Kong auteur Johnnie To—who helmed such bravura crime pictures as Election and Drug War, along with other genre-spanning work—is Three, a showdown between cops and criminals that takes place almost entirely within a hospital. The movie glided in and out of select theaters last summer unbeknownst to many American moviegoers, but fear not, the film will be hitting digital platforms, Blu Ray and DVD in the coming months. Ahead of Three’s non-theatrical release, The A.V. Club has premiered an exclusive new trailer from Well Go USA that, though brief, suggests a film gleefully loaded with operatic violence and inventive set pieces.

The premise of the film is not immediately evident from the teaser, so here’s the basic setup: a criminal (Wallace Chung of Drug War), knowing that he doesn’t stand a chance against the police if he faces them head-on, shoots himself so that the cops are forced to take him to a hospital. While there, he refuses medical treatment, biding time until his henchmen can rescue him and trying to outwit an infuriated cop (Louis Koo, also of Drug War and a panoply of other Hong Kong crime movies, including last year’s SPL 2: A Time for Consequences). Also caught in the fray is the surgeon (Vicki Zhao of John Woo’s Red Cliff) who has been assigned to save the criminal’s life.

As each side tries to outmaneuver the other, the space of the hospital becomes a claustrophobic, labyrinthine battleground, and it is the “battle” part that stands out the most in the latest trailer. The first 25 seconds of the trailer are the wind-up, with the sound of a ticking clock driving up the suspense; the rest is all release, with a knife jab escalating into an all-out lobby shootout complete with explosions and slo-mo effects. As far as hospital shootouts go, Three has a high bar to clear (the long-take bullet bonanza from Hard Boiled), but from the looks of the trailer, this film will be quite the ride, even apart from the action set pieces.

Read our review of Three here, and check out the full trailer above. The film will be hitting digital platforms on March 7 and Blu Ray and DVD on April 4.