JOHN WOO

He is revered as the god of action. His movies revitalized genre filmmaking around the world. He makes heroes out of gangsters and makes the audience care for the villain. He is known for the heroic bloodshed and ballistic ballet in his movies. But John Woo is more than just a deity of dynamic screen bloodshed. Like Kurosawa, Peckinpah, Fuller, and Huston, his best work is concerned with deeper issues than the creation of thrilling action and super-cool screen heroes.

John Woo is best known for his unrivaled direction of tightly choreographed action sequences - gunfights of mythic proportions. Fellow filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino once said of Woo, "Yeah, he can direct an action scene, and Michelangelo could paint a ceiling." But besides spectacular action, Woo’s films showcase characters with an audience-pleasing chivalry and spirituality out-of-step with the convenient relativism of the modern world. His main characters are men who experience platonic passion for one another through bloody rites of passage in emotionally charged scenes. When Chow Yun Fat (Woo’s signature lead actor) slowly swaps guns with his opponent in the bloody finale of A Better Tomorrow 2, the pair is acknowledging that the heroic ritual of the duel is more important than either individual. Woo’s heroes are unapologetic modern knights.

Woo was born in Canton in 1946, but four years later, to escape Communism, he and his family moved to the slums of Hong Kong, where they lived in a succession of tin shacks. In an interview, Woo himself states, "…when I was a kid in the slums I always felt like I lived in hell. I dreamed a lot. Always dreaming of flying away from hell. To go to another, better place, a place with no violence, no hatred, no crime, and where the people all care for each other. And I always felt lonely. I had to deal with gangs every day. It was hard to get close friends. But when my mom took me to the theater, everything would seem okay. I would find my dreams in the movies…"

Spending much of his childhood at the movies, he developed a strong preference for European and American films over the local product. Woo’s family was too poor to give him an education, so his schooling was sponsored by an American family through the Lutheran Church. He says his early ambition was to become a priest - "I wanted to help people as I had been helped. I was deeply impressed with the altruism of the American family who paid for my education that my family valued but was simply unable to supply." However, Woo performed badly in school, and constantly skipped classes to go to the cinema, art museums, and libraries. He finished his high school education at a Catholic school and began making experimental films. He wanted to go to film school, but his family could not afford it. Instead he worked for the Lutheran Church to support his film-making activities. He began developing his writing skills and was exposed to foreign ideas.

In 1969, he was hired by Cathay Studio where he worked his way up from stage hand to assistant director. He switched to Shaw Brothers studios in 1971, where he worked as an assisstant to action maestro Zhang Che. Woo started his directing career in 1973 when the kung fu genre was at the height of its popularity. His first films were excursions into the genre, although kung fu did not hold Woo’s interest for long. Of his early movies, The Last Hurrah in Chivalry (1978) is interesting as what Woo himself calls a ‘prequel’ to A Better Tomorrow (1986), both films dealing with chivalry and loyalty.

Like his screen heroes, Woo tended to be a loner, standing apart from current trends in artistic development. The 1979 emergence of new wave filmmakers passed him by. While younger directors were making ground-breaking films, Woo worked with inane comedies such as Follow the Star (1978), Laughing Times (1981), To Hell with the Devil (1982), and Run, Tiger, Run (1985). But in 1986, with the release of A Better Tomorrow, Woo was able to fuse the old and the new. A Better Tomorrow is the defining urban thriller of 80s Hong Kong cinema. It is a raging torrent of blood, sweat, and tears. More than just a hyperstylish, emotionally overwhelming re-creation of Coppola’s The Godfather, Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, and your choice of Japanese yakuza (gangster) flicks, it’s the film that put John Woo and star actor, Chow Yun Fat (HK’s Scorsese and De Niro) on the map.

A Better Tomorrow’s collection of masterfully designed shoot-outs set a new standard for not just Hong Kong cinema, but cinema in general. In its own unique way, it is an introspective thriller examining moral values binding gangsters and killers. Good-natured horseplay gives way to brooding nostalgia, followed by tear-drenched melodrama - and then a big fight scene.

The film was a remake of Cantonese director Lung Kong’s The Story of a Discharged Prisoner (1967), following its basic plot but expanding further on the Chinese concept of yi. Western audiences may recognize the term in its deployment in Japanese Yakuza pictures, where it functions as ‘giri’, translated as ‘duty’ or ‘obligation.’ Giri stems from the Chinese word yi, signifying justice or righteousness. Yi postulates a system of brotherhood, honor and justice binding all who operate within a fraternity, whether criminal or otherwise. More specificallyl, individual characters talk of a system of personal loyalty.

The story of A Better Tomorrow is all about keeping faith and observing the code of yi. Woo had very clear ideas of the kind of film he wanted to make : "It’s not a gangster movie. It’s a film about chivalry, about honor, but set in the modern world. I want to teach the new generation : ‘What is friendship? What is brotherhood? What we have lost? What we have to get back…"

Sung Chi-ho (portrayed by Ti Lung) and Mark Lee (Chow Yun Fat) are delivery boys for a syndicate dealing in counterfeit notes. When they try to smuggle notes into Taiwan, Sung is betrayed, captured and goes to prison, leaving Mark alone to square up to his betrayers. This leads to the film’s most famous and much parodied set piece - Mark sashays into a posh restaurant with a babe on his arm (in slow motion of course), stashing a small arsenal in a row of potted plants. After bursting in on the collection of do-bad diners and serving them an assortment of lead aperitifs, Mark beats a patient retreat, collecting his potted hardware and continuing to off his adversaries - but not before taking a pair of crippling slugs in his shin and knee. Three years later in Hong Kong, Mark goes through life as a bum, humiliated by the new boss of the syndicate, Shing, the man who betrayed them. The final showdown is, in essence, a battle between the traitors and loyalists of the code of yi. The blood-bath would be tragic if not for the protagonists’ grotesque refusals to die and their florid gestures toward martyrdom when they actually do die. Never before had the underworld life of the triads (Chinese gangster societies) been so lovingly rendered in scenes of slow-motion mythologizing and bullet-riddled elegizings.

The huge commercial success of A Better Tomorrow launched the usual wave of imitations that follow a hit Hong Kong movie. Some came close to matching Woo’s level of bloodshed, but few could equal his style and fewer still combined the carnage with a fresh concept. One exception would be director Ringo Lam in City on Fire starring Chow Yun Fat, which would become the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.

Woo’s next film, The Killer, has done more to spark interest in Hong Kong cinema in the west than any film since Five Fingers of Death. The Killer is a stylish, heartfelt action film, made by a wonderfuly skilled director whose celluloid paradigm is informed by everything from doom-laden French crime movies like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouriai to to ancient Chinese chronicles of patriotic assassins to the American thriller, Dirty Harry. It is his most Leone-esque movie, full of languidly intense moments when the camera lingers on faces in extreme close-ups, complemented by an adagio on the soundtrack. These moments are plentiful and occur in between Woo’s typical baroque action scenes. The sum total of balletic violence and poetic meditations of killer and cop as they size each other up in almost transcendental terms, gives the impression that The Killer is more about sentiment and feeling.

In a 1996 Seattle film festival program, critic Sean Axmaker categorized The Killer as "the Woo chick flick". He’s right. There’s a pulpy romantic quality inherent in The Killer that is absent from his other work. However, male bonding and over-the-top gunplay also feature prominently in the saga of torch singer Jenny (Sally Yeh), who is accidentally blinded by hit man Jeff (Chow Yun Fat), which also happens to be the name of Alain Delon’s character in Le Samourai, during a fiery nightclub shootout. Guilt-ridden over the maiming, Jeff gradually builds a relationship with Jenny, who is unaware of her suitor’s true identity until much later in the film. Eventually, the ever-more world-weary assassin Jeff takes on "one last job" to finance a cornea transplant for Jenny. After the deed is done, however, his paranoid employer would rather kill him than pay him the money.

Meanwhile, determined cop Li (Danny Lee) tails him with all the dogged determination of Popeye Doyle pursuing heroin smugglers in The French Connection. Li is really a fan of jeff’s style, initially impressed by the fact that Jeff had saved the life of a little girl hurt during a shoot-out after he has been betrayed by his partner Sidney Fung (Chu Kong). Empathizing with Jeff’s yearning for a better life (similar to Woo’s own childhood), the upright policeman recognizes himself in the killer. When the cop elects to set his worldly duty aside temporarily to stand shoulder to shoulder with his new soul brother against the armies of the night, Jeff can only shake his head over the irony : "The only person who really knows me turns out to be a cop."

As in most Woo outings, there’s a growing bond between hunter and hunted, as Jeff and Li discover that despite being on opposite side of the law, they share many of the same ideals. Many U.S. critics might view such relationships as homoerotic, but the passion stirred between such comrades seems based more on mutual sacrifice through trying times, than on physical attraction. In fact, Woo parodies this perception in a hilarious scene in which Li cauterizes a flesh wound sustained by Jeff (using gunpowder ignited over the wound). After the painful procedure, in which Chow’s agony-wrenched face contorts, orgasm-like, both men are shown in relaxed mode, sharing a cigarette like two post-coitus bedmates. The movie is at its most elegiac in dealing with the conflict of interests between the two erstwhile partners, Jeff and Fung. Fung’s life is spared by Jeff for old times’ sake. In return, Fung risks his own life in asking Wang (Jeff’s employer who tries to kill him) for Jeff’s money. He does it as ‘a last tribute to a friend’ but he must also prove his own worth in terms of a professional code which binds the two killers - evidence yet again of Woo’s preoccupation with yi as a private loyalty between his characters. It is also this which brings Jeff, the killer, and Li, the cop, together and reinforces their feeling of deep loss when betrayal of yi entails sacrifice to prove one’s personal worth and friendship.

Woo’s clever use of humor springs forth in other original forms, including a scene in which Li tracks Jeff to the home of Jenny. Both men, with guns pointed each other’s foreheads in Mexican standoff mode (a pose which would become another staple of all Woo films), put on a civil front so as not to alarm to blind Jenny, who is oblivious to their antagonistic relationship. Unbelievably, Woo says he drew his inspiration for this scene from Mad magazine’s "Spy vs. Spy" series! Within his films, Woo also has a strong sense for visual symbolism. His background as a Methodist has been well-publicised and many viewers were stunned when he detonated an effigy of the Virgin Mary during the climactic gunfight. "To me, (she) symbolises all that is good and pure," he explains. "When the villains destory the statue, it’s like they are destroying the last goodness." The perversely funny finale of The Killer concludes Duel in the Sun style, with sightless lovers Jeff ‘n Jenny crawling towards -and past - each other in the dust.

Many of the outsized gestures in Woo’s films, the unrestrained bold strokes of emotion melodrama, are a tough sell to fans of American-style action films, which nowadays are as coolly brutal as possible. But if Sam Peckinpah’s most characteristic sequences are blood ballets, then surely Woo’s are Chinese blood operas. The Killer is terse and laconic in a poetic sort of way, setting out to be a paean both to Western masters (Melville, Scorsese, Leone, Peckinpah) and to classics of the swordfighting martial arts genre in Hong Kong which Woo evokes and transforms through his own ‘hero movies.’ The interludes of rapturous slaughter are like arias, releasing the tension that has been accumulating in the "recitative" passages of dialog. John Woo takes violence out of the realm of spectacle and turns it back into a tragically self-defeating human activity, committed by fully fleshed-out characters for reasons that make sense - at least to them.

The Vietnam War is the setting for Bullet in the Head (1990), John Woo’s most extreme statement yet on the theme of male bonding and Hong Kong people’s capacity for courage, cowardice, and greed.

Bullet in the Head is a story about Ben (Tony Leung, who would later star as Chow Yun Fat’s symbiotic soul-mate in Woo’s HardBoiled), Paul (Waise Lee), and Frank (Jacky Cheung), three best friends who share everything. In the opening scenes, we can see that they live carefree lives, not caring about the world around them. The movie is set in 1967, not a good year for the territory. For perhaps the first time in its history, Hong Kong is shaken by violent political riots instigated by local followers of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

The three buddies frequently get into trouble, being typical feizai (teenage rebels and gangsters) fighting with other gangs. In the opening sequence, we also see that Ben cares about his girlfriend, Paul wants success in life, and Frank has no cares at all (he takes a beating in the head from his mother, which will be brought back later). One more scene in the opening is one of the three racing down the docks on bicycles. They get to the end of the pier, Frank almost falling over the edge, but saved by the other two.

They are truly the best of friends. But all that changes, when, on Ben's wedding night, Frank tries to obtain money to pay for the wedding. But on his way, he runs into Ringo, a gang leader who wants the money. In the process of trying, he breaks a bottle over Frank's head. This is the second time we see him take a strike to the head. (John Woo is noted for using repetetive elements in his movies.) But both of these will heal in time. And as Ben says later, he can share the pain (after slamming his own head into a wall). In sharing this pain, Ben goes for revenge, killing Ringo. This forces him to flee Hong Kong, and as the three of them share everything, Paul and Frank go with him. Before leaving, Ben tries to get his newly wed wife to go with them. But as he tries to meet up with her, they are caught up in a war protest. This is Woo's political commentary on the event of Tiananmen Square. The riot is brutal and bloody. But even with all this going around him, Ben is only concerned with his girl. They part ways, her saying that it is the same in all parts of the world. At this point, Ben starts to see the violence around him, but does not fully realize how bad it is.

The trio flees to Vietnam, hoping to lay low and smuggling goods to gain fortune. But they are quickly overcome by events there as an assassination takes place, and they are amongst the suspects. They watch in horror as the culprit is executed on the spot with a shot to the head. As he falls, a statue of The Pieta (the Virgin Mary holding Christ just taken down from the cross) can be seen in the background. Once again as in The Killer, we see Woo’s use of Christian symbolism. Ben, again begins to see the reality of consequences for their actions.

Generally unflustered by the experience, they stay on. Later, they meet a singer from Hong Kong, Sally, who was forced to stay at a night club against her wishes. Ben asks her if she needs help, and she accepts. They meet later at a bridge, where another war protest is taking place. Once again, a riot ensues, and the two are caught in the middle. Flashbacks of the previous riot run through Ben's mind as he sees senseless violence around him. Woo films the scenes more brutal and bloody than the previous, as though Ben was having an even deeper understanding of what's happening.

The "Three Musketeers," as they could be called, meet their D'Artagnan in Luke (Simon Yam). Luke is the only one who tried to help Sally, but because he was alone, could not do much. But now, with Ben and Frank, he's sure he can get her out. At this point, the tone of the film becomes darker and more despairing. The innocent, West Side Story-inspired mood of the movie’s opening street brawls radiates carefree - if two-fisted - innocence, but latter passages are smothered in claustrophobic tension and invasive horror. The pivotal transformation that leads A Bullet in the Head down this progressively darker path is that of Paul from devoted buddy to ruthless profiteer. The son of an impoverished street sweeper who yearns for wealth, Paul abandons all semblance of morality when he learns of a chest of gold. In classic John Woo style, the four rescue Sally and get the gold with guns blazing. As they're fleeing, they come across an bridge which is under attack by the Vietcong. In their car, they try to make it across, refugees asking for help around them. The brotherhood begins to break here, as we see Frank and Ben giving money, while Paul tries to shoo them away, pushing them aside.

In the next few scenes, they are attacked on a beach as they try to flee by boat. Paul, unconcerned with anything but his gold becomes troublesome to the others. Sally dies in the process. On the boat, they witness Paul's greed, as he threatens to shoot Ben (in the now trademark Woo Mexican stand-off) rather than lose his gold. For the third time (second was during the rescue of Sally), Frank stands up for Ben, offering himself first to be killed. But Paul backs down. Again they are attacked, and forced ashore. They have an opportunity to escape, but cannot because of Paul's attachment to the gold. Luke, however, gets away.

Things go from bad to worse when Sally is killed, and the film’s original trio is held captive by the Viet Cong in a riverside concentration camp. A nearly unbearable scene ensues, in which the baby-faced Frank is forced by sadistic Viet Cong to shoot fellow prisoners pointblank, or risk receiving a bullet to his own head. The reality of war and violence is now very clear to them. Echoing The Deer Hunter’s horrific Russian Roulette sequence, this hellish ordeal will drive Frank insane in much the same way Christopher Walken’s Nick was scarred for life in Michael Cimino’s 1978 epic. Ultimately, the trio are rescued by Luke, who endures facial scarring to accomplish this in another example of good being achieved only at the expense of physical or psychological punishment in Woo’s films. During the tense rescue, the completely greed-consumed Paul finds himself hiding from Viet Cong pursuers with the fragile Frank. When Frank refuses to quiet down as their military adversaries close in, the bloodless Paul silences his one-time childhood friend with an unsympathetic bullet in the head. This action, which doesn’t end Frank’s life, but instead leaves him in a state of semi-insanity and chronic pain, forever severs the seemingly unbreakable bond that the three Hong Kong comrades had once shared.

Eventually, Paul returns to Hong Kong, gaining great monetary wealth and upwardly status via his gold cargo, at the expense of his soul. Ben, meanwhile, remains in Saigon to search for Frank, whom he finds living as a heroin-addicted transient, killing for money with which to enable his fix. Ben spares him any further pain by providing euthanasia via handgun: it’s one of many painful scenes to sit through as A Bullet in the Head’s spiraling doom continues. As another repeated element, Frank’s injuries to the head are once again brought up. But this time, Ben cannot share the pain. In the end, Paul meets his maker in a four-wheeled race to the death with Ben (conjuring up images of the intro sequence with the trio racing on their bikes), the last of the three to emerge with sanity and soul intact. This sequence is shot with a lot of blood being visible. It’s a major contrast to the opening scene where to blood at all could be seen during the fights. It’s a bleak finale to this harsh, unsparing movie, which Woo is quoted as saying ranks among his favorite self-directed films.

The stressful mayhem in A Bullet in the Head provides no respite. Stripped of the comic relief and satire that made the bloodletting in other Woo movies more bearable, this wartime drama is the director’s most disturbing and unshakeable film. It was because of this that the movie didn’t do very well at the box office. In their 1996 book Sex and Zen & A Bullet in the Head, Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins correctly proclaim that, "No one who sees A Bullet in the Head can remain neutral: you either love it or you hate it."

Woo heavy-handedly hammers in his themes and allusions to Vietnam War movies in order to make a statement about Hong Kong. The film was released one year after the Tiananmen massacre. Woo says he ‘poured a lot of emotion’ into the film because of his feelings about the massacre : "What I really wanted to do was to make a film about how people behave in wartime or in times of chaos. Friendship is important to me because I have seen this is one of the first things that is lost during wartime. People become selfish when their survival is threatened, allowing evil the chance to grow. And this is a real tragedy; it is the way we become spiritually defeated, by abandoning our trust in one another. In this film I wanted to address something that was happening in Hong Kong or will happen in Hong Kong. Wartime Vietnam was a metaphor for all this."

Bullet in the Head explores the fundamentally shaky, explosive nature of the Hong Kong character and its reliance on violent stereotypes and emotional tokens designed to counter the suggestion that Chinese people are unemotional. The substance of male bonding lies in this need for emotional tokens as much as in the code of yi with its associations of honor, duty, decency, and loyalty. The loss of friendship means the ultimate betrayal of the code of yi : "The way I see it, it is only by bonding together and trusting each other that we will survive," Woo said. But the film was too grotesque, too precariously perched on the edge, to be accepted at face value. Woo was confronting Hong Kong audiences with an unflattering picture of themselves and they did not like it.

Woo pointed out that the film had a tragic tone and was utterly devoid of heroes, while audiences could sense that wartime Vietnam functioned as a metaphor for their own predicament, having filled their spiritual void with materialistic greed. On top of that, people had experienced the pain of the Tiananmen massacre the year before.

John Woo took a break after A Bullet in the Head from his usual fare and filmed a romantic action-comedy, Once a Thief (1991). But after the heroic bloodshed wave had almost reached ebb tide, the true maestro returned to show how it should be done. In 1992, Woo reverted to the hard ground of the violent action thriller in, what is arguably his best Hong Kong-era film, Hard Boiled.

Hard-Boiled immediately bathes itself in noirish atmosphere as it establishes the maverick identity of Tequila (Chow Yun Fat), a cop by day and a jazz clarinet player by night. Blue smoke fills a jazzy nightclub where Tequila takes on musician mode, with devoted police-partner Lionheart (Bowie Lam) backing up his horn-playing on drums. The two are summoned to an area teahouse to investigate possible gunrunning. And within minutes of the opening frame, the scene is set for a shootout like no other. Like guard dogs barking at lurking burglars, sparrows inhabiting the teahouse’s many hanging birdcages flutter anxiously before Tequila and Lionheart are engaged in a furious ballistic ballet with an army of weapons-dealing thugs.

Hard-Boiled is not as plot-driven as Woo’s other classics: the camera is the main character this time out. Like The Road Warrior, which funnels its entire narrative down to a hyperintense, masterfully focused race between a Mel Gibson-helmed tanker and an army of mohawked nihilists, Hard-Boiled culminates in the takeover of a hospital by illegal arms dealers and the heroic, "fly in the ointment" presence of our heroes to save the day. The film has often been described as "Die Hard in a hospital", but Bruce Willis’ smirk doesn’t hold a candle to that of Chow Yun Fat’s rebel cop Tequila. The latter is so cool that he can slide down a stairway handrail with a gun in each hand, mowing people down left and right with a toothpick firmly clenched between his pearly whites. (An obvious homage to Dirty Harry Callahan, who could casually chew sandwiches while asking punks if they felt lucky staring down the barrel of his magnum).

Meanwhile, his intense partner Tony, a slick undercover cop played by Tony Leung, hangs out on his yacht making origami swans when he isn’t combining forces with Tequila to face off with villains Johnny and Mad Dog. When these ruthless gun smugglers take over the hospital’s maternity ward full of newborns, it’s up to the two cops to save the infant hostages. The final gurgling baby, affectionately dubbed "Saliva Sammy" by his rescuer Chow, coos happily as, in loving slo-mo, Chow coaxes smiles and coos from the infant while mercilessly blowing away pursuers with a handgun. At one point, he shields the child’s eyes from the orgy of bullet-addled bodies, exclaiming, "Don’t look – X-rated action!" It’s this unlikely blend of innocence, humor, stylish camerawork, and kinetic violence that makes Woo’s movies as visionary as anything gracing the silver screen.

So far, yi established the rules of the game in which even the bad guys know the limits of their wrongdoing. To a bad guy versed in yi, the cops may be the mortal enemy, but in battle one tries not to involve innocent bystanders and certainly to leave the sick and disabled, not to mention babies, out of harm’s way. Hard Boiled blows this professional rule to smithereens. Woo comes up with the following thesis : there are no standards of morality which underlie the art of killing by bad men. Woo appears to abandon his concept of yi as the only arbiter of morality in the action genre. He acknowledges that there is a social morality to contend with.

The relationship between Tequila and Tony is more conventional than the film’s treatment of its bad guys, who are no longer seen as romantic sub-heroes because yi makes them so. The bad guys really are very bad guys. Even Tony is seen as an inveterate, if also introspective, killer. Tequila and Tony are but variations of Jeff and Li of The Killer, repeating the borderline relationship between cop and killer, good guy and bad guy. This time, both Tequila and Tony are tragic heroes who know that action and violence somehow bring out their worth as human beings. We begins to see the nature-of-the-beast quality of Woo’s heroes. Killing and violence are so much a part of their characters that they must make something meaningful out of them. In Woo’s films, it is the code of yi which helps to confer meaning and moral justification, changing the beast’s fundamental nature into one of knightly gallantry.

Ironically, Tequila and Tony are on the right side of the law, though they do not subscribe to the rules and regulations - the underground code of yi is more binding. But there is now a difference, a clearer delineation of right and wrong. Put in another way, the wrong side has no more recourse to moral strength. That it did so previously was all along an old-fashioned ideal. Modern precepts of law and morality had at last caught up with John Woo. He now portrayed his villains as neo-savages, modern barbarians who appear to have inherited the tradition of Attilla the Hun and his baby-eating hordes. Just as the first action sequence sets the mirror-shattering pace in which a genre’s conventions are broken, the grand finale grips audiences in heart-of-darkness horror as they stare into the reality of the criminal underworld. The excess of the sequence, rather than its imagined atrocities, is what blows the mind. Even though the babies survive the sequence, the audience’s sympathies with the film may not.

During a 1996 film festival spotlighting his work, Woo commented that many of the action scenes featured in Hard Boiled were done "when I was in a crazed state". He described a scene in which Chow cradles Saliva Sammy in his arms while running like a bat out of hell down a hospital corridor, with explosions timed to go off behind him in a chronological pattern. There would be no second chance if Chow didn’t run this tightly choreographed gauntlet at just the right speed. "Had he slowed down," admits Woo, "I don’t want to think what might have happened." There are equally insane set-pieces filmed on a yacht and in an auto manufacturing warehouse. Watching these intricately-assembled action scenes, one is found in a morally challenging dilemma: the violence is extreme, but it’s also hypnotic and beautiful, with bodies moving about like graceful dancers and explosions lighting up the periphery like fireworks. The verdict is in: John Woo shoots gorgeous violence.

Hard Boiled is several steps beyond the formula action filmmaking that routinely comes out of Hollywood. With the possible exception of George Miller’s The Road Warrior, this eye-popping masterpiece is the most visceral action movie ever made. That Woo’s elemental rawness does not work against him is due to the incredible array of themes and stylistic conceits with which he bombards his audience. Religion and morality, with the attendant rituals, rules of dimension to Woo’s pictures. In spite of the intermingling of violence and religious symbolism in films such as The Killer, Woo cannot be called a sacrilegious artist. He challenges the conscience of the establishment and attacks its power and hypocrisy. His heroes are vain and revengeful but they hold honor, truth, and integrity in high esteem. Morality as a wholistic concept does not concern Woo as much as the question of ethics - that dimension which claims that morality itself has no foundation unless backed by an individual’s ethical decision. The central theme of religion and ethics binding characters together permeates Hard Target (1993), Woo’s first Hollywood film in a career move taking him away from Hong Kong to America where violence is second-nature to screen heroes. Lacking a complex hero (Jean Claude Van Damme), Woo piled his audience with neatly-choreographed action sequences, but the film is a virtual textbook of classic Woo symbols for anyone who wants to discern them.

It was merely a matter of time before John Woo was drafted by Hollywood to incorporate his trademark gonzo style and themes into American actioners. However, it took three films before he hit his stride in the U.S. Why? Perhaps it was due to America’s unwillingness to give him free rein over his projects, or the rather generic scripts handed him the first two times at bat, or his own unease working in the Hollywood studio system. Whatever the reason, the trademark brisk energy and vivid characterizations of the Woo Hong Kong movies was absent from his debut U.S.film, 1993’s Hard Target, and its follow-up, 1995’s Broken Arrow. The former took the tired man-hunts-man plot of The Most Dangerous Game and fused in onto a Jean Claude Van Damme vanity project. The "muscles from Brussels" failed to project the multidimensional personality of a Chow Yun Fat or a Simon Yam, preferring bicep-flexing and rump-shaking in rapid-cut, MTV style stunt sequences (which are, truth to tell, pretty good, especially in the lengthy director’s cut). Despite claiming the number one box-office slot upon its release, Broken Arrow suffered from the uninspired casting of wormy Christian Slater and generic Samantha Mathis. The two proved to be drab heroes in pursuit of warhead-filching (and scene-stealing) psychopath John Travolta (who had a chance to warm up for his brilliant, dual-role Woo follow-up in Face/Off). Meanwhile, Woo dabbled in television, directing the pilot episode of the Canadian-produced Fox series Once a Thief in 1996, before being handed a script worthy of his directorial talents.

Considering Face/Off’s (1997) violent energy, deranged humor, and strangely symbiotic relationship between its two main characters, it’s amazing that Woo didn’t script the story himself. It takes an outrageous premise and makes it poignant, disturbing, and believable, due to the strength of its performances and the psychological depth of its screenplay (by Mike Werb and Michael Colleary).

Face/Off introduces FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta) as a spiritless burnout still reeling from the death of his young son in his arms, at the hands of psychotic terrorist Castor Troy (Nicholas Cage). The introductory segment, in which the murder is performed on a carnival carousel, incorporates slow motion, faded pastel colors, and a soft, hazy focus to conjure forth an idealized dreamscape turned nightmare with the pull of a trigger. As Troy realizes from a nearby hilltop that he’s missed his intended target, Archer, and killed his defenseless son instead, there’s a look of quizzical, near-remorse on his face. Throughout the movie, Cage punctuates his performance with these nuances, and succeeds in making an utterly impulsive, opportunistic, egomaniacal killer seem almost human.

Well, almost. When he’s not picking children off bigtop rides with his considerable arsenal of firearms, he’s planting bombs in central Los Angeles and fondling choir girls ("You make even a hack like Handel sound great", he tells a young blonde chorus member before gleefully grasping her buttocks). Troy’s lust for life extends as far as sex, money and guns, but his spirits are quickly dampened by the merest setback. During a wild chase at LAX, Troy wastes both a stewardess he’d been seducing moments earlier, and his plane’s pilot ("Fly, bitch!" he commands impatiently) when Archer closes in for the kill. Soon afterwards, when the vengeance-seeking Archer has a gun to Troy’s head, his cornered prey breaks out in song. "I’m ready for the big ride, baby," he croons, before getting sucked into a wind tunnel, ramming a steel grillwork, and slipping into a coma.

With Troy presumed to be permanently out of commission, Archer reports the news to his relieved doctor wife Eve (Joan Allen) and goth-garbed teen daughter Jamie (Dominique Swain). But he’s still incapable of celebration. At work, he silences the congratulatory cheers of his fellow agents. When Washington sends champagne, the dour Archer is unimpressed. "I didn’t know they catered", he grumbles. His mood deteriorates further upon news that there’s a bomb set to blow up a chunk of L.A., and only Troy and his equally dangerous geek brother know of its whereabouts. When efforts to interrogate the latter are met with failure, Special Operations agents suggest an alternative plan.

"I know who you are", exclaims Archer when he’s introduced to state-of-the-art surgeon Malcolm Walsh (Colm Feore). "Yes", says Walsh, "but you don’t know what I can do". In an up-to-date spin on the "we can rebuild him" sci-fi concept of The Six Million Dollar Man, Walsh demonstrates his power to graft the face of one man onto the body of another. Soon, Archer is putting all the pieces together as he learns that Troy has been kept alive in a vegetable state and is ripe for de-facing. As the recipient, Archer could pose as Troy, meet with his brother in prison, extract information of the bomb-planting site, and reclaim his previous mug. "The process is completely reversible," assures Walsh.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, the supposedly comatose Troy awakens from his slumber in a chilling, if unlikely, sequence. Bringing a hand to his skinless chin, he whimpers in shrill panic before noticing his arch-rival’s mug preserved in the next room. After having accomplices kidnap Walsh and force the surgeon to graft Archer’s face onto his own exposed skull ‘n muscle head, Troy kills all that are aware of the covert, low-key project, takes on the agent’s identity and claims the career and family of his nemesis. Meanwhile, Archer spends his days rotting in prison, mindful of the all-too-disturbing reality that his son’s assassin is now sleeping with his wife and parenting his impressionable teen daughter.

Fortunately, Woo recognizes not only the horrific but also the comic possibilities of this premise. Travolta gives a borderline brilliant impersonation of Cage, with his erratic vocal deliveries and manic enthusiasm. He cooks candlelight dinner for the attention-hungry Eve, and teaches his would-be daughter how to fend off horny boyfriends with a switchblade ("stab ‘em in the thigh, then turn the blade so the wound stays open", he instructs helpfully). Archer’s transformation from depressed sourpuss to revitalized life of the party is fun for awhile ("Boss, who removed the stick from your ass?" jokes a fellow FBI agent). But when he begins doing his law enforcement job too well by sniffing out and leading the FBI into the dens of his adversaries, suspicions are raised. "I don’t know where you get your information", says a puzzled FBI superior.

After surviving a rabble-rousing, hyperviolent jailbreak, Archer’s first priority is to win the trust of his wife, despite the surgical makeover. This he does, through an emotionally sincere and meticulously detailed account of their first date after breaking into his once-welcome home. Meanwhile, Allen grounds the films from spinning out of control: she’s the audience’s identification point on this wild ride. After taking a discreet blood sample from her impostor husband and comfirming the switch at the hospital, Eve plots with her appearance-altered hubby to make things right. Meanwhile, with his new underworld-friendly face intact, Archer find himself given easy access to both the lair of Troy’s girlfriend (Gina Gershon) and her affections. Meanwhile, the discovery that Troy has a son of his own rekindles within Archer the memories of his own parental loss.

At this point, Face/Off goes cheerfully over-the-top. There’s a church shootout which seems lifted from The Killer, with its candles, white doves and crucifixes contrasting wildly against the bullets ‘n bloodshed. There’s the Mexican standoff to end all Mexican standoffs, in which nearly every character has a gun to someone else’s temples ("What a predicament," cackles the Archer-camouflaged Troy, who enjoys such adrenaline-inducing situations, even when his own life is threatened). To one-up this cleverly staged bit of mayhem, Woo outdoes himself with a boat chase that ends with Archer harpooning the demonic Troy to a dock house. This time, it appears that the resigned Troy really is "ready for the big ride."

Face/Off’s final scene, awash in the same dull pastels and off-focus imagery that marked its initial frames, has an emotional resonance that is uncommon for a contemporary action blockbuster. Compare it to the rather manipulative and broadly-drawn scripts of such Jerry Bruckheimer thrill rides such as Con Air and The Rock (both, ironically, starring Cage in far less memorable performances). Face/Off, in contrast, is the one in-your-face actioner whose characters and predicaments stay with you long after you’ve left the theater.

Following his success at finally mastering the Hollywood action game with Face/Off, John Woo has continued to expand his horizons. A return to television work was realized with the pilot episode of 1998’s Blackjack series (directed by Woo and starring Dolph Lundgren), while his more recent work as producer has included 1998’s The Big Hit with Mark Wahlberg and The Replacement Killers with his old Hong Kong mainstay Chow Yun Fat. Currently, the busy director stands at the helm of Mission Impossible II with Tom Cruise, and is scheduled to reteam with star Chow Yun Fat on soon-to-be-produced heist film King’s Ransom. Let’s hope that Woo continues to use – and not be used by - Hollywood to realize his unique cinematic vision, while maintaining the same original energy and impassioned characters that infused his earlier Hong Kong work with such unmatched spark and personality.

His better films, including the Hong Kong gangster masterpieces he turned out from 1986 to 1992, are loaded with such transcendent movie moments. Sardine-can crowded with sentimentality and melodrama, juxtaposed with the sledgehammer slam of brutal, unprecedented carnage, his movies are always alive with emotion and movement. It’s as if Woo reaches a stage in his films where he lets his intuitive id take over, throwing all logic, restraint, and subtlety to the wind: a hallucinatory quality results that is unlike anything ever put on film. With Woo, more is always better.

Woo presents violence as something both real and unreal. There are good guys and bad guys. Within the circle of bad guys, there is a further division of right and wrong. There is that moral choice between adherence or non-adherence to yi. Adherence implies hope and salvation, importan elements to Hong Kong people torn by doubt over their future. The title, A Better Tomorrow, offers not a false hope but a real one. There is a yearning for redemption, almost as if Hong Kong people were mired in a sinful past and no less sinful present. To an audience, the choice is whether to take Woo’s message seriously.

-JoE-
©2000 JMR