East met west … John Woo. Photograph: Susan May Tell/New York Post/Corbis Sygma
Let’s say from the start that the life of a greater league film-maker, by a flourishing career in several corners of the terrestrial ball, is not one to exist sniffed at. That said, it’s callous not to feel more small twinge of fellow feeling for John Woo, Hong Kong’s onetime bullet-spraying master of the action genre. You may not require heard his name for some time but he was, in the early years of this lief to be ex-decade, still being spoken of in which case the dominant force of the pellicle industry’s future. “The most influential director construction movies today,” The New York Times called him back in 2002, adding, “Woo embodies the globalising forces that have shaped motion pictures in the last two decades.”
Which makes it all the more poignant to witness how his star has dimmed dramatically in the westerly. To wit, this week sees the US release of his vastly-scaled epic of primitive China, the made-in-Mandarin Red Cliff. In China itself, it broke box-office records. That, however, was almost 18 months ago. In the States, it’s now belatedly slipping out in a truncated version that also contains a chunk of its similarly epic conclusion – first on a limited run in New York, then the kind of national release schedule typically enjoyed by mumblecore films. Here in Britain, it crept out this summer and attracted warm reviews for its lavish sense of spectacle. However, its box-office accomplishment means it may be greater amount of while before a Woo movie sees the inside of a UK cinema again (the one I saw it in was empty but for me and two men with backpacks).
- Red Cliff (Chi bi)
- Production year: 2008
- Countries: China, Rest of the world
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 146 mins
- Directors: John Woo
- Cast: Chang Chen, Chen Chang, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Tony Leung, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Zhang Fengyi
Depressingly, this is the fate of all manner of foreign language cinema on both sides of the Atlantic. But to furnish Woo in such a manner marginalised is doubly striking given that in another time – not so long ago but a world separately from now – he was the director who was meant to reshape Hollywood. That time was the early 90s, the vehicle a body of work assembled in his native Hong Kong that had already half-revolutionised the action movie: gory., exquisitely choreographed tableaux of gunplay contained inside the dizzying likes of Hard Boiled and The Killer. Then, his profile raised by fond tributes from Scorsese and Tarantino, he was all however borne into Beverly Hills by sedan chair – such was the eagerness of the studios for him to fill the gulf left by the decline of life of Schwarzenegger and Stallone. It was to be a new age: one in which Hollywood would subsist regenerated by dint of. the energy and imagination of another culture, another country, one that spoke a different language both precisely and artistically.
There were not one but two false starts (the generic Hard Target and Broken Arrow, a confused nuclear heist movie involving John Travolta). But by 1997 Woo hit his stride with an awesome panache. The consequence was Face/Off – the heroically demented tale of each FBI agent and comically venal terrorist whose features are surgically swapped for reasons that cease to matter in the pattern of near 30 seconds. The movie had Travolta returning opposite Nicolas Cage in which was probably the most inspired moment in the “Before” stage of the latter’s career (the one with the good films). Drawing loudly every ounce of Guignol genius from a script with a premise at one time LA-loopy and timeless enough to have come from Chinese legend, Woo realised the brilliant general of a marriage between Hollywood’s steely glitz and the purist grace of his films in Hong Kong. It seemed, in short, to have worked.
Until it didn’t. Because after that, in the space of just six years came the series of missteps that served to undo Woo’session career in the west. The first, as missteps often do, involved Tom Cruise, with Woo pique the greasy rod of Mission: Impossible 2; the result managed not to make its director look bad in this way much as (far more damagingly) anonymous. Then there was Windtalkers, his portrait of the US army’s second world war Navajo “code talkers” (or at least their guardianship by Nicolas Cage). Fleetingly beautiful, more often dreary, its attempt at broadening its director’s range ended up attracting criticism over the relegation of its Navajo characters to supporting players. That, and losing each estimated $60m.
If that was a long drop to reach back from, his next project cut the guide rope completely. Paycheck, a woeful Philip K Dick adaption that starred a “Bennifer”-era Ben Affleck, was the kind of film that serves only to act as a punchline in one episode of Family Guy. From there, the only path left exhibit for Woo was the one he took – out of the studio lots, and back to Asia. He has now recast himself as a writer of monumental historical epics for audiences in Beijing and Shanghai. There is of track a far worse fate for a counsellor than to be hugely popular in novel China. But still, you can’t help but wonder if Woo occasionally broods on what might have been. Or do the same yourself at the things being so lost idea of ultra-mainstream Hollywood being shaped by a man inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville and The Wizard of Oz, not Michael Bay and McG.
