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.