Thursday, January 16, 2014

REVIEW: "The Kill Fever" (Wolf #1) by Dean Breckenridge

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If you like your action-crime fiction the same way you like your women—short, no fat, hard-edged, and packing a wicked punch—then you’ll be in hardboiled heaven reading this short story by Dean Breckenridge. The first in a planned series, “The Kill Fever” introduces us to Wolf, a shadowy protagonist who roams the gray wasteland between the law and the lawless. Wolf’s enigmatic appearance is summed up with this brilliant economy of prose: “Callaway knew him only as Wolf. Nobody knew his first name. Nobody knew where he had come from. Callaway didn’t think he was a bad guy; wasn’t entirely sure he was a good guy.”

This kind of sparse, stripped to the bone style suffuses this story from its first syllable to its final pronoun. Breckenridge wastes nary a single word; in fact, if there is a flaw—and that “if” is certainly debatable—it’s that setting and description take a back seat (actually, they take the trunk, right under the spare tire and the dead hooker) to dialogue, pace, and action. There is a vibe about “The Kill Fever” that is reminiscent of Richard Stark and in the hedonistic halls of hardboiled, there may be no greater compliment.

In fact—and forgive the imminent blasphemy—for action fans, “The Kill Fever” may actually be superior to Stark’s stuff, because Breckenridge ensures Wolf gets into plenty of gun scrapes over the course of a 51-page story. Hardboiled writers frequently fail to include enough gun-slinging to attract carnage-craving action aficionados, but Wolf packs plenty of heat and isn’t afraid to blow holes in the bad guys.
 
Granted, if you want graphic kills, this may not be up your dark literary alley. This is not that kind of story. You don’t write a lean, mean, pared-to-the-bone thriller and then go excessive to describe what a bullet does to human anatomy. So you get lots of “the bullet hit the man and dropped him,” but not so much “the bullet exploded deep inside his chest cavity, shredding the heart and blowing chunks of cardiac tissue into dripping rags of sodden meat as blood-fueled bone splinters shot across the room in a red, wet geyser and painted a crimson Picasso on the opposite wall.” See the difference? One is classic hardboiled. One is action splatterpunk. Nothing wrong with either one, but “The Kill Fever” is the former, not the latter.
 
I don’t read much hardboiled because of the aforementioned lack of action, but of the few authors I do follow in the genre, Breckenridge might just be my new favorite because he found a way to insert action-adventure tropes into the framework of hardboiled crime-thrillers. It’s not as easy as it sounds—I gave it a try (successfully or not is for the reader to decide) on “The Killing Question”—and I hope he continues to impress as this series continues. Because wolves are dangerous yet noble, fierce yet captivating … and so is Wolf.

Saturday, January 4, 2014

What Happened to John Woo?


I still recall carting John Woo’s The Killer back from the local Blockbuster to my college dorm after being seduced by the irresistible box art tagline: “One vicious Killer. One relentless cop. 10,000 bullets.” The back of the VHS box promised “the biggest body count in history.” Even with a loathing for dubbed/subtitled films, I had to watch it. After all, I was a 20 year-old action movie connoisseur and bullets and body counts were Cool. Yes, cool with a capital C.

So watch it I did—three times in a row—my awe expanding with each viewing like a hollow-point mushrooming through brain-meat.

It had heart. It had emotion. It had layered themes of loyalty and brotherhood and friendship. It had balletic gunplay. It had graphic bloodshed. It had poetic slow-motion. It had white doves. It had religious symbolism. In short, it had everything you could want in an action flick.

It was the film that made director John Woo a cult name in America. After languishing in the martial arts genre for years, it was his near-perfect triple play of A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hardboiled that gained him the attention and accolades of the American action movie audience. Woo’s maestro-like ability to make bloodshed beautiful and blend it with stylized action and engaging themes could mean only one thing:

Hollywood would sink their claws into him and do their damndest to shackle his skills and ruin his reputation.

We all know the tale by now. Woo was wooed (yeah, I just did that) by the Hollywood movie-making machine and made his American debut with Hard Target, starring Oscar-winner Jean Claude Van Damme. (OK, I made up the Oscar winner part, but I like Van Damme better than I like most Oscar winners.) Even after the studio drastically interfered with Woo’s vision, the morons in the MPAA slapped the film with the dreaded NC-17. Frustrated at having his creativity censored, Woo nevertheless trimmed the violence, but it still wasn’t enough and the studio brought in someone else to deliver the final cut and secure an R-rating. All one needs to do to see how cruelly Woo’s vision was crushed by studio interference is watch the bootleg Director’s Cut of Hard Target and compare it to what was eventually released. The Director’s Cut is a John Woo film through and through; the R-rated cut is just a sanitized American action flick with some John Woo touches.

Woo continued to toil beneath the censorious whip of his Hollywood masters, directing Broken Arrow, Face/Off, Mission Impossible: II, Windtalkers, and Paycheck. Face/Off is the closest we came to receiving a true John Woo film during his stint in America, but much like Hard Target before, Broken Arrow bore only a few flourishes to define it as a John Woo flick, and while his Mission Impossible entry remains the most stylish of the series, it takes more than motorcycle jousting and slow-motion doves to create a true John Woo movie. As for Paycheck … the less said about that, the better.

Weary of having his creative vision enslaved to the will and whim of studio execs, Woo has returned home to China, but his interest in two-fisted action movies seems to have been left behind. Sure, there are action scenes in his period war film Red Cliff and his wuxia entry Reign of Assassins, but hardly the high-octane bullet ballets upon which he built his brand. This, frankly, is a tragic loss for action junkies. John Woo arrived in America a lauded, respected, innovative action choreographer, one of those directors whose name was emblazoned on top of the movie poster—“A John Woo Film”—rather than the credits at the bottom. Even the TV commercials for Hard Target emphasized the film was directed by John Woo. But a decade or so later, Woo fled back home with an apparent lack of interest in the heroic bloodshed genre.
 
John Woo
I don’t know exactly what happened to the director I fell in awe with in my college dorm room all those years ago, but I know this—I would trade you all the Bourne and Expendables and Transporter movies for just one more operatic action masterpiece from John Woo. Bring back Chow Yun Fat, bring back the black trench coats, the mirrored sunglasses, the swirling gunplay, the Mexican standoffs, the white doves, the slow-motion blood squibs. I don’t care if it’s an all-new movie, the long-rumored sequel to Hardboiled (which would be all kinds of awesome), or something else. As long as it’s got guns ‘n’ guts and John Woo directing, I’ll be there with a toothpick, a Beretta, and a smile.

Hell, I might even forgive him for the trampoline scene in Blackjack.