The opening scene of Johnnie’s To’s “Exiled” is one drawn-out sleight of hand trick. On a quiet back street in Macau, two pairs of trench-coated toughs await the arrival of a man named Wo. A slow breeze whistles through. When Wo (Nick Cheung) arrives, the heavies gingerly tap their cigars and finger their holsters, and two of them follow him up to his apartment. He pulls a six-shooter out of a drawer, and an explosive three-way shootout ensues.

With its deliberate pacing and quiet sense of ceremony, Mr. To’s overture is straight out of a Sergio Leone Western, and therein lies the central illusion — and disappointment — of “Exiled.” The film looks like something the late, great Italian director of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” might have made, were he turning out films today in Hong Kong. But behind the stylish camerawork and the occasional hot-metal scent of gunsmoke and grinding existential gears is a pretty run-of-the-mill action movie.

That said, it’s a pretty watchable one. The plot, structured around balletic bursts of violence, never stays dormant for very long. And while Mr. To is not the best choreographer of ballistic mayhem out there — he overdoes the slow-motion, and his sense of rhythm could be keener — he has an antsy approach to the material that suits the film’s theme, namely that boys will be boys, even (perhaps especially) if they carry a piece.

Remarkably, everyone escapes unscathed from the confrontation in Wo’s apartment. When the smoke clears, Tai (Francis Ng) convinces Blaze (Anthony Wong) to renege on his contract to kill Wo; the other two henchmen (Roy Cheung and Suet Lam) come up and start helping Wo and his trembling wife move in some new furniture.

It turns out that the five of them have been friends since their school days. Having failed to knock off Wo, Blaze has now become the target of local kingpin Boss Fay (Simon Yam). A sequence of bloody encounters with Boss Fay and his men results in the death of one of the gang, and the remaining members skip town to wander aimlessly through a landscape that vaguely resembles rural Texas. As if by accident, they walk smack into a gold-transport truck being ambushed; shortly after, Boss soon summons them back to the city by cell phone.

The ping-pong script, by Kam-Yuen Szeto and Tin-Shing Yip, doesn’t invest enough in the characters — Blaze, played by the tersely cool Mr. Wong, is the only interesting one — or the themes of loyalty and male camaraderie to make the intervals between shootouts compelling, and Mr. To’s attention seems to wander. Rather than reaching cruising speed, the plot is subjected to a series of jump-starts.

One of the film’s more interesting elements, however, is the parallel it draws between pre-millennial Macau — “Exiled” is set in 1998, just before the former Portuguese shipping hub returned to Chinese sovereignty — and the Wild West. Civil society is practically nonexistent (oddly, there are no bystanders) and the austere colonial-era hotel that serves as a rendezvous for outlaws and prostitutes looks an awful lot like a frontier inn, especially when a gunfight leaves its hardwood floor littered with corpses.

As in many of Mr. To’s previous films — including his most popular one, “Fulltime Killer” — ostensibly adult conflicts in “Exiled” resemble teenage rivalries, and the brisk face-offs play out more like locker-room scuffles than matters of life and death. (Bullets never harm the characters, as least the good ones, as much as you’d think they should.) Right before blasting a room full of bad guys, the film’s adolescent-acting wild bunch jumps into a photo booth together. The good-times snapshots that come out of it have a certain poignancy. But the movies have produced plenty of cowboys and gangsters more memorable than these.