Sorry, I thought you were someone else. You know, that fella that made The Killer and Hard Boiled? What, you are? Then what is all this business with that Ben Affleck geezer, a man who could take acting lessons from the cast of Thunderbirds, his acting’s so wooden?
Somewhere down the line I can’t help but feel you lost your way. I remember all those wonderful movies you made with Chow Yun-fat, Leslie Cheung and Danny Lee. Like most fans of Asian films I was brought up on the A Better Tomorrow series, Hard Boiled and the classic The Killer. They might have been great action movies but first and foremost they also had a lot of heart - ultimately you cared for the characters.
Like many, you learnt your trade from one of the most influential of all Hong Kong directors, Zhang Che. You might have absorbed your mentors interest in relentless masculine tales of honour and betrayal, yet you rarely dealt your female characters such a bad hand - even if they still didn’t account for much screen time. Stepping out from his shadow you made films like Last Hurrah for Chivalry. In those days you might have used swords instead of guns, but the relationships between the male leads was quite recognisably ‘Woo’.
Teaming up with seventies Shaw Brothers star Ti Lung, tv star Chow Yun-fat and pop star Leslie Cheung you helped rewrite the book for Hong Kong movies in the eighties with the incredible successful A Better Tomorrow. A mix of high octane action scenes and melodrama, it began a series of films that would spread your fame to the west. A sequel followed, where you showed you had the confidence to parody your own work, then the one that floored them all, The Killer. A violent yet beautiful love story of an Assassin with a heart of gold who wants to give it all up, but must commit one last hit to afford his love the surgery she needs to see again. There isn’t a bloke on the planet who hasn’t cried at the end of that film.
Though you might have filled you films with more firepower than both world wars, you never let the action get in the way of some great performances form your leads, who were fantastic actors anyway. And nothing could be more emotionally powerful than A Bullet in the Head, your personal take on three friends from Hong Kong who become involved in the Vietnam conflict. Then Hollywood came calling, and with the handover of Hong Kong back to China only a scant few years away you answered.
Hard Target was a lesson learnt the hard way, it allegedly wasn’t the film you wanted to make. But how could it have been, with Jean Claude Van Damme cast in the lead? Then favourite for action roles if you couldn’t afford Arnold, it completely ignored the fact that all your leads had been actors, not martial artists. Like, even if you do come from Hong Kong, not everyone is Bruce Lee, are they?
Your next move turned out be a clever manoeuvre. Hard Boiled returned you to Hong Kong with a much bigger budget, you used that to concoct some of you finest actions scenes ever - some so bizarre they touched ridiculous. Yet you got a way with it! The image of Chow Yun-fat fending off the bad guys with a baby in his arms is one of the great icons of the genre (and you have been responsible for a lot of them).
But your return to Hollywood wasn’t much of an improvement, Broken Arrow. Heck, the calibre of your cast had gone up, now you had Christan Slater and John Travolta to call on, but the best thing to come out of it was that Travolta was brilliant as the bad guy - and he loved it!
So along came Face/Off, and no American produced film better caught the narrative of a Hong Kong movie, that all important male bonding between the leads. And this time you had Travolta and Nicholas Cage. Yes, the story was ridiculous! Who cared?
If Mission: Impossible 2 might not have fired on all cylinders, it still did the job. And as you rubbed shoulders with one of the most powerful (short) men in Hollywood, Tom ‘Napoleon’ Cruise you even had the chance to take the mickey out of your own movies again. But then came Windtalkers, the most insulting post-9/11 schmaltz to have made it to the big screen. Nicholas Cage or not, things looked pretty bleak for one of the worlds best action directors - which, by the way, wasn’t particularly well directed.
Now we have Paycheck, with Ben ‘will he won’t he’ Affleck, a man whose dubious relationship with multimedia star J-Lo has increased his stock beyond any proved talent or box office success. Have you forgotten what made your films truly work? That you had such a strong calibre of actors, usually two powerful leads that played off each other? And lets face it, Philip K. Dick is pretty much unfilmable in its original form. So I’m rather apprehensive of what the result might be…
So how did it happen? Were we wrong about your talent?
Those early days must have been tough. Making the best of a meagre budget so that it never showed on screen. At a time when Hollywood began pouring in the big money (and big stars) into the action film you had a couple of decades head start on them. And hell, did it show. For all the millions they had, you still literally blew them out of the water.
You’re by no means alone, directors like Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam have made those same tentative steps into American movies with that same obligatory lead - Jean Clod - with Double Team and Replicant respectively. The results, unsurprisingly, are pretty terrible. But fortunately both have made amends to their original audience by returning to Hong Kong and making films like Time and Tide and Looking for Mr. Perfect.
And its not just Hong Kong directors, as China’s Chen Kaige, director of the fabulous Farewell, My Concubine and The Emperor and the Assassin would no doubt love us to forget the ill-conceived thriller Killing Me Softly. And Japan’s gun totting ex-stand up comedian, ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano, fared little better with Western co-production Brother.
Of all the Hong Kong directors Ronny Yu, of The Bride with White Hair fame, seems to have fared best. Admittedly, he only just bypassed the ‘Van Dammed’ factor for Teenage Mutant Ninja Kangeroos in the form of Warriors of Virtue. With bizarre choices like Bride of Chucky he gave us a knowing revision of everyones least favourite talking doll. Then with The 51st State he gave us an equally knowing action movie, which cast Meat Loaf against Robert Carlyle and a kilt wearing Samuel L.Jackson. No, they might not have been the best movies ever made, but they were fun. And perhaps part of their success is down to Ronny keeping his Hong Kong team together throughout, like cinematographers Peter Pau (who won the Oscar for his work on Crouching Tiger), Poon Hang Sang and editor and sometime director Daniel Wu. That was until his latest, Freddy vs. Jason. Oops!
Actors don’t seem to have fared any better. Least of all Chow Yun-fat, whose destiny now seems linked to you, Mr. Woo. Forced to star in lamentable action movies like The Replacement Killers and Bulletproof Monk, his only decent Western action role so far and been the non-all singing, all-dancing version of The King and I, Anna and the King. Besides Jackie Chan and Jet Li few others have even made it over. And let’s face it, they haven’t made the transistion too well.
So what worked. Of all the collaborations perhaps the most promising have happened in France. Firstly Luc Besson, keen to make amends for his wonderful The Killer ripoff Leon, wrote and produced Kiss of the Dragon, for Jet Li and the star of the Hollywood remake of his Nikita, Brigitte Fonda. He was also behind the debut movie for Jet’s choreographer Corey Yuen, The Transporter.
Then came Chistophe Gans’ Brotherhood of the Wolf. Part Horror, part period drama and part martial arts epic, no one could really tell what it was - which covered up some of the poor plot exposition. Heck, it was still one hell of ride. And again, had some pretty heavy involvement from Hong Kong players like choreographer Philip Kwok and, again, editor Daniel Wu. Could we be emphasising the importance of the director too much?
So what’s the lesson? Maybe if we are going to move forward we have to create something new. You’ve helped teach America how to at least make bearable action movies. You even got ‘Napoleon’ Cruise thinking he can make The Last Samurai. But if you really want to make another really memorable action movie, you’re gonna have to rewrite the book. Just remember - and I’m sure you’ve heard this before - you’ll never find anything original in Hollywood.
