So, to go from the obscure to the obvious, I'm sure I'm letting you all down by Going There with this whole betrayal thing and admitting that the first thought that jumped into my mind when pondering the fine traditions of this day was Waise Lee fucking over Tony Leung and Jacky Cheung in Bullet in the Head. I know, I know, I really need to get out more.
Waise Lee is actually one of the great underrated douchebags in cinema. His similarly douchey turn in A Better Tomorrow warrants mention as well. Surprisingly, these two early-career blasts of genius didn't translate into more lasting fame. He did a couple pictures here and there, and turned up in Infernal Affairs III, but that was years later. He's primarily notable these days for people in Hong Kong teasing him that he looks like Dubya (which I don't get, but whatever). Poor guy. Waise's failure to take off was not shared by the director who gave him his first two iconic roles: John Woo is here to stay. For better or worse.
John Woo has had a pretty weird career, to Western eyes. He came up in a fairly ho-hum manner in the Hong Kong movie industry, directing assembly-line kung fu pictures and comedies. Then, out of nowhere in the mid-80s he invents a whole new genre of cinema, widely called “heroic bloodshed.” He has a little over half a decade as one of the coolest directors on the planet. Then he comes to America. And . . . well . . . he's still here. Kind of.It's the period that stretches from A Better Tomorrow to Hard-Boiled that I'm focusing on here, because it's (not all that) coincidentally my favorite period of his career and the one where he made all his “important” pictures. His early work showed occasional glimmers of inspiration, touches that kind of prefigure things he did later (though it helps knowing that his classics existed already in looking ahead in those early pictures). And his American movies, frankly, fucking suck. His best American movie is Face/Off, and Face/Off sucks too; any movie where I have to watch both Nicolas Cage and John Travolta overact for two and a half hours can go fuck itself. Any movie, moreover, that is not redeemed even slightly by Gina Gershon's presence (she is good in it) can find other orifices in which to go fuck itself again.
But lest we forget, once upon a time John Woo made a handful of very fine motion pictures, ones whose influence had a massive effect on not only his domestic film industry but worldwide as well. Was an extremely talented director given, at long last, greater creative control? Was a competent journeyman fortunate enough to capture lightning in a bottle? Did Martians beam down, say “Fuck, dude, that guy has a cool name, let's mind control his ass into making some cool movies we can get high to, but then cruelly turn him into a middle-class man's Brett Ratner in the US and let everyone wonder what might have been”? We may never know.
A Better Tomorrow, Parts 1 & 2 (1986, 1987)
Where it all started. Leslie Cheung is a cop. Ti Lung is a crook. They're brothers. Leslie Cheung gets tres emo about Ti Lung's criminality. Ti Lung, in turn, says, I see your emo and raise you a sincere desire to reform that you'll of course have to ignore until Act 3. With that—and Waise Lee's experimental research in advanced doucheology—taking up all the plot, there's not enough room for Chow Yun-Fat to stretch his legs. But he makes his presence felt.
The one indispensable scene in the first A Better Tomorrow does not, shockingly, involve Leslie Cheung or Ti Lung crying about their splintered relationship (I mean, seriously, you'd think they were fucking). It involves Chow Yun-Fat in a Kyle Reese-ish long coat and shades, “planting” guns (in potted plants herf herf herf) while sauntering into a nightclub, whereupon he lights up half the convicted felons in Hong Kong, and instead of reloading, just grabs new guns from where he left them BECAUSE THESE ARE THE WAYS OF MEN YOU FUCKING INFIDELS.
Sadly, Chow Yun-Fat gets shot in the leg and loses his swagger, giving over the rest of the plot to a whole lot of crying scenes and Waise Lee's excellent performance as a gigantic fucking douchebag. And Chow Yun-Fat gets killed at the end. BUT . . . A Better Tomorrow was an international sensation and Chow Yun-Fat was so awesome in his two scenes when he wasn't crippled that he immediately became the biggest movie star in Asia. And this is Hong Kong, byetches, you best believe there's gonna be a sequel. And Chow Yun-Fat kinda has to be in it. What to do . . .?
Oh, what's that? You want to bet me $20 there's no way they'd be shameless enough to pull the “long-lost twin brother” gambit? Fork it over, sucker, that's exactly what they do. Not only is Chow Yun-Fat in the sequel, Woo goes out of his way to give him cool shit to do. Witness the off-the-chain brilliant scene where two “Mafia” jagoffs come into Chow Yun-Fat's NYC restaurant to start shit. Chow Yun-Fat comes in, speaks some phonetically-learned, borderline-gibberish English dialogue, and without even breaking a sweat is holding the Mafia guys at gunpoint when the cops show up. And he's cool enough that the cops fuck with the Mafia guys instead of him. A force to be reckoned with indeed.
Ti Lung and Leslie Cheung are back as well, although now that Ti Lung is a cop (?) there's less bitchiness, but it wouldn't be A Better Tomorrow without a little bullshit drama. New character Dean Shek is introduced, and unfortunately spends an interminable amount of the movie as a drooling retard after his daughter gets killed. That part of the movie drags like nothing I have ever seen before. But, fortunately, it ends, and Dean Shek snaps out of it, a badass once more.
After Leslie Cheung gets killed, Ti Lung, Dean Shek, and Chow Yun-Fat decide to dress up in black suits, arm themselves to the teeth, and murder. The climactic action sequence in A Better Tomorrow II is about an order of magnitude more badass than anything previously captured on celluloid. Ti Lung runs out of bullets and says, “fuck it, I'm using a sword.” Chow Yun-Fat and one of the bad guys, while each holding two guns, empty two clips into each other from what's basically point blank range. The bad guy dies. Chow Yun-Fat lives. Let no one say John Woo was a fool; he knew if this one was a hit there'd need to be a third one, and even HK cinemagoers weren't going to buy “Waise Lee's twin brother got plastic surgery to look like Chow Yun-Fat's twin brother and Leslie Cheung's twin brother that somehow neither Ti Lung nor his twin brother knew about has to get plastic surgery to look like Waise Lee in order to . . . have sex with Joan Allen?” (John Woo later used this idea as the basis for Face/Off).
The Killer (1989)
Wherein John Woo says to himself: “Ya know . . . A Better Tomorrow Part I & II were fun, and so was that Almost Heroes picture that no one in the West is ever gonna see because it's not that great, but I think there's shit I can change.” To wit--
---Make Chow Yun-Fat the lead. Because fucking shit, people, at his peak this man was movie star. And no, I didn't type that wrong. He wasn't a movie star. He was movie star. The phrase exists independently of his name due to some stupid linguistic failure but I didn't break the English language, it was this way when I found it.
---Pursuant to the above point, write Chow Yun-Fat a really good lead character. Make him equal parts Alain Delon in Le Samourai and Rock Hudson in Magnificent Obsession (hey, if you want to make a masterpiece you have to run the risk of civilians thinking you're crazy, and John Woo was clearly going all in with his reputation on this one).
---Actually, shit, let's not just stop at Chow Yun-Fat. Let's make this whole picture one gigantic homage to Jean-Pierre Melville and Douglas Sirk, a dual remake of Le Samourai and Magnificent Obsession.
---But . . . fuck, JP and Dougie were cool but their pictures were kind of slow. Hmm. What can I do . . . what can I do . . . wait, hold on, I'm John Woo! *gets Tsui Hark on the phone* Dude, get me a whole fuckin shitload of guns.
---Actually, while I still gotcha on the phone, Tsui Hark my friend and producer, how's about this—every single gun battle in the picture is as intense and awesome as the plant scene and the end of ABT2? Oh, wait, except the last one, dig it . . . the last shootout's going to be in a church. No shit. The bad guy's going to vaporize the Virgin Mary with a shotgun blast. Several hundred extras in white jumpsuits are going to fly through the air and get shot.
---And THEN, I'm gonna kill Chow Yun-Fat again . . . and the nightclub singer he blinds, falls in love with, pulls One Last Job to pay for the surgery, and dies trying to protect. And they're going to be crawling around, both blind, looking for each other, and crawl past . . . and the ghost of Douglas Sirk smiles and says, “nice job, sir.”
I first heard of The Killer when Brandon Lee was promoting Rapid Fire. He was doing a ton of press, working the “Bruce Lee's son following in his father's footsteps while still being his own dude” angle. So I'm sittin' there, 13 years old or so, reading the Post, checking out this interview, and the reporter asks him, “So, what's hot in Asian cinema these days?” And Brandon Lee doesn't miss a beat: “The Killer. John Woo. Remember that name and watch that movie.” He goes on so excited that he practically tells the reporter that you don't have to get the bootleg version at Kim's with the crappy subtitles anymore because there's a dubbed version you can rent. The excitement was palpable.
So a couple days later, The Killer comes on cable in the middle of the night. It's a school night so I tape it, then hurry home the next day so I can watch it. Hooooolleeeeeee shit. This was the first time I ever saw Chow Yun-Fat, which was a massive cultural landmark in my life. I was young enough that it very well may have been the first Asian movie I saw that wasn't a Bruce Lee movie or a knockoff thereof.
Even more than igniting an interest in Asian cinema, The Killer got me excited about foreign movies in general. In reading about John Woo's influences, I discovered the French New Wave, and satellite directors to that movement like Melville, even Americans like Robert Aldrich who were kind of honorary French guys.
The Killer is the best movie John Woo ever made. My favorite is yet to come in this discussion, only because The Killer is so emotionally powerful that its rewatchability is limited. There can be no question, though, watching The Killer, it is a profoundly beautiful work of art as well as an action movie of almost overwhelming skill and originality. And let's not forget, Raekwon the Chef sampled about half the movie on Cuban Linx. (Lest you think I'm being flippant, Rae is a cineaste of intense passion and impeccable taste; his assessment of Scarface: “THAT SHIT WAS THE FUCKIN' BIBLE!”)
Bullet in the Head (1990)
For a while, during the brief long-ago period when John Woo actually had hipster cred, if you didn't want your skinny jeans and ironic PBR confiscated, you had to say “Sure, The Killer's great, but it's popular. Bullet in the Head is John Woo's masterpiece.” (Actually, shit, that was long enough ago that it might have been skater pants rather than skinny jeans . . .)
Anyway, the point is, Bullet in the Head has a specific place in John Woo's oeuvre. It's legitimately batshit crazy, almost nauseatingly violent, and basically feels like a nightmare. The story of three buddies (Tony Leung, Jacky Cheung, and Waise Lee) from Hong Kong who go to Vietnam in '67 to be war profiteers (and because they have to get out of town) only to get caught up in the madness, Bullet in the Head is about two-thirds Deer Hunter pastiche, one-third standard John Woo male-bonding epic. That one-third sandwiches the unwieldy middle two-thirds, though. While Bullet in the Head is a better movie than The Deer Hunter (which is mainly of note today primarily as the instructive example of what a right-wing egomaniac with final cut looks like jerking off . . . for three . . . fucking . . . hours . . .) it's no easier to sit through. After Jacky Cheung takes the titular ordnance to his dome piece, he follows Christopher Walken's example and becomes a pro at Russian roulette. And meets the same fate, eventually.
Fortunately, once Tony Leung gets back from Vietnam, shlepping Jacky Cheung's skull to show to Waise Lee, who has, being Waise Lee, left them for dead in Vietnam and gone home to become the head of the yuppie Triad, it turns back into a John Woo movie. The final action sequence really has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, but that's actually kind of good, since the rest of the movie is so disturbing and overreaches so. But still, this movie gave us Tony Leung.
Once a Thief (1991)
A personal favorite, even though it's extremely lightweight, shifts tone clumsily, and makes no sense. Actually, it's not true that it makes no sense, I'm just annoyed at myself for spacing on the various meanings of “brother” and “sister” in Cantonese, which led to me thinking this was an incest story for years (since both Chow Yun-Fat and Leslie Cheung romance Cherie Chung).
We start in France. Our heroes are art thieves, and we see them pull off a couple pretty slick heists. This part of the movie is the most fun, until an explosion apparently kills Chow Yun-Fat (hey, John Woo kills him all the time, how are we supposed to know he's gonna show up again in like fifteen minutes). Then there's a mopey interlude where Leslie Cheung and Cherie Chung try to go civilian in Hong Kong. Then Chow Yun-Fat and their adopted father (who I'd thought was their real father because my first bootleg copy had REALLY shitty subtitles) rope them back into pulling another job. Or something.
It later inspired an inoffensive Canadian TV series. The HK version is better of course, though it makes a lot of sense when you find out, as imdb informs us: “The time elapsed from the first day of shooting and the first public screening of the finished film was ten weeks.” Yeah, it's not a deeply felt auteur picture, it's a programmer, but it's a good programmer.
Hard-Boiled (1992)
This is a very important movie. Few movies ever have conjured as clearly the image of a director walking around with his dick casually out, his AD following nervously to make sure it doesn't touch the ground. (Interestingly, Kathryn Bigelow divided by zero and did the exact same thing on Point Break the previous year).
Ok, deep breath. Chow Yun-Fat plays a cop named Tequila. Who is a jazz musician. Fuck goddammit wait a second *head explodes*. Okay. So he's a cop. Who is a jazz musician. Holy shit. All right. Tony Leung plays an elite killer who lives alone on a houseboat, surrounded by paper cranes, each representing a man he's killed, his loneliness total. Alain Delon probably saw this movie and went “fuck, I should have been a plumber or something . . .”
Hard-Boiled fucking opens with one of the greatest gun fights of all time. First scene. That's how the character exposition is happening up in here. A bunch of gun dealers come into a tea place with birdcages (in which they keep their guns). A couple pointless yet awesome slow-mo shots. When it's time to kick ass, Chow Yun-Fat drops his cigarette into his teacup and then it's on. Chow Yun-Fat bashes a guy in the nuts with a metal teapot. Guns guns guns everywhere. Spectacular stunt work. Chow Yun-Fat enters the two-gun-shooting Hall of Fame yet again with this masterpiece, sliding down a bannister.
But then his partner gets killed. And it turns out the scary guy with the machine gun was deep undercover. (OMG is this foreshadowing in re: Tony Leung? Shut the fuck up, Tony Leung hasn't even been introduced yet . . . oh no wait, there he is in his red sports car, never mind).
So, basically, the story is, the bad guys are selling guns. Anthony Wong is the baddest, and since he looks white, you know he's fucked up. Chow Yun-Fat is trying to get at him. Tony Leung is working for this nice old geezer who Anthony Wong has a massive boner to fuck over, and who he gets Tony Leung to betray (pissing off right hand man Philip Kwok, who despises betrayal more than anything, and who is one seriously dangerous motherfucker in this movie).
Part of the problem of keeping the story straight in Hard-Boiled is keeping from hyperventilating during the action scenes, which have not yet been topped, and are without peer in any previous movie. There have been isolated moments before and since that have been pretty cool, but John Woo gives you twenty solid minutes here and there of the coolest shit you've ever seen. Sure that means Chow Yun-Fat occasionally doesn't run out of bullets for hours at a time (the only time he does is when he draws down on Tony Leung at the end of the warehouse extravagunza and clicks on an empty chamber; Tony Leung, in turn, reveals his undercover status by not killing Chow Yun-Fat, giving him a kiss-my-ass smile, and disappearing into the smoke).
The hospital shootout at the end is not only a half-hour long, not only climaxes with Chow Yun-Fat rescuing a baby (who, when Chow Yun-Fat catches on fire, as happens during shootouts, pisses all over him to put the fire out), but contains this sequence (note, from 0:09 for like forever, there ain't no cuts. Yeah.) Even if the hospital shootout was all there was, Hard-Boiled would be the greatest action movie ever made (even though it's not as good a movie as The Killer, note rewatchability comes into play here). But it's just the cherry on top.
I absolutely love that John Woo, knowing he was leaving Hong Kong for the US, decided to just whip it out and show motherfuckers who was boss as his swan song. Historical context thus comes into play in making this my favorite picture of his. Especially since, in the US, he's yet to make a good movie. I still haven't seen Red Cliff, but since he didn't make it in the US, it wouldn't count anyway. But still, fall from grace though he did, John Woo will still be John Woo for that 86-92 period. Even though he might not be cool anymore, we are all in his debt.
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