It’s John Woo at his most brutal and explosive, but Woo fans beware – there was a reason this film originally stayed on the shelf for a couple of years…
Chan Chung (Eddy Ko, The Postman Fights Back, Duel To The Death, PTU) leads a ragbag band of mercenaries into the Golden Triangle, where Myanmar, Laos and Thailand collide, to capture an infamous drug baron and bring him to justice. Seizing the baron turns out to be the easy part, however, after the team intervene when they see a corrupt Vietnamese general (Lam Ching-ying, Mr Vampire, Heart Of Dragon, My Lucky Stars, Eastern Condors) raping a French tourist.
Soon they find themselves in hostile territory, with not only the general’s troops and the baron’s warlords to contend with, but also a vicious tribe. Will they ever make it out alive?
Heroes Shed No Tears was famed action director John Woo’s first real ballistic effort. Leaving behind the comedies (like the recently released Run Tiger Run) that helped make his name in the early eighties, he turned to action – and how! Surely this film must hold some kind of record for the amount of explosions, bullets fired and final death toll in a 90-minute film?
But fans looking for a Woo fix after his disastrous American outings beware – this is not A Better Tomorrow. In fact, it’s hard to believe that would be his very next film, the leap is so great. Perhaps that speaks reams about the gap between what Woo was trying create, and what he ended up with, especially as he would return to its central themes in A Bullet In The Head and Windtalkers.
It’s a messy affair, with narrative jumping around in vain attempts to set the premise of the next scene. Inappropriate comedy scenes, like the scene where one member to the mercenaries ends up blowing up a village chef (and the rest of the village!) after gambling with him, grate against the grim tone of the rest of the film. There’s even an American Vietnam deserter, who’s set himself up a harem of Asian beauties in the middle of the jungle (who also happen to be pretty handy with a machine gun).
That seems mainly due to interfering producers insisting he include scenes of sex and drug use to attract an international market for the film and a tight shooting schedule in Thailand. Even then his producers, including Peter Chan (dir. He’s A Woman, She’s A Man, p.The Eye, Dumplings), showed no faith in the result. Filmed in 1984 and 1985, it was only released on the back of A Better Tomorrow’s success. Even Woo himself disowned the film for a while (as he has a tendency to) before more recently stating that this was his first ‘real’ movie.
The plot of Heroes greatly resembles that of Wong Sing Lui’s Escorts Over Tiger Hills, also echoing that films hopeless situation. From the very beginning you know that any the mercenaries are going to be lucky to make it out alive. It is also reminiscent of Sammo Hung’s Dirty Dozen inspired Eastern Condors released a year later and starring his old friend Lam Ching-ying.
Indeed, this is Woo at his most nihilistic. The torture of Chan, with his eyes sewn open, Clockwork Orange style, whilst hung out in the sweltering sun, is one off the most vicious acts committed to celluloid in Hong Kong cinema. The usual optimistic outlook – displayed even when his leads die heroically lay down their lives for their brothers – seems lost in the questionable morality of the mercenaries. The only morale seems that they get, as they put it themselves, ‘what’s coming to them’, with their own avarice often causing their downfall. He seems to be saying that there is no happy ending.
There are hints of the slick action that was to come, but there’s also a lot of clumsy camerawork and set ups. True, the explosive first ten minutes, when the mercenaries capture the baron, is nothing on what is to come. Yet the penultimate battle, where the fractions team up to against them, stalls the film with its lengthy shootout (even if the final showdown between Eddy Ko and Ching-ying is a fantastically visceral brawl). There’s more than a nod to Sam Peckinpah and the sort of carnage you’d find in The Wild Bunch, who Woo, like his mentor Zhang Che, greatly admired.
Much of Woo’s inspiration for the story comes from the manga and film series Lone Wolf And Cub, with the relationship between ronin Ogami Itto simply transposed to that of Chung and his son. In fact, he even directly lifted from the series. For instance when Chung’s son is kidnapped and has to buy himself to prevent being burned alive is just a re-enactment of a scene from the fourth film in the series Baby Cart in Peril.
Real Woo fans will find this an important step in the creation of Woo’s trademark ‘Heroic Bloodshed’ style. In that sense it really is his first ‘real’ movie’. Apart from anything else, the sex scenes forced on him by his producers seemed to be the last straw, and a position he would never allow himself to be in again (or at least until he moved to America!)
Sure, it definitely has its moments, but sadly they are few and far between. Woo novices should leave this way down on their list, well after the classics like the A Better Tomorrow series, Hard Boiled and, of course, The Killer. Even those familiar with his Hong Kong work should instead try his erratic, but underrated Just Heroes and the fabulous Shaw Brothers-esque Last Hurrah for Chivalry – should either finally see a DVD release in the UK (not long now, surely?)
DVD details
Distributor: Hong Kong Legends (UK)
Yet another very fine transfer from Hong Kong Legends that knocks spots off any other versions of the film available, including the HK/US DVD and Laserdisc.
However, once again the extras are rather questionable. Trailers, a 'tribute' to Lam Ching-ying and an interview John Woo which feel 'repurposed', if not just plain lifted, from a prevous release. And isn't it about time HKL spent a little more on producing these featurettes - rather than very cheap looking interviews?
