Hard Boiled (1992, John Woo)

The first act of Hard Boiled is fantastic. Between Woo’s glossy, smooth jazz but with bite tone and Chow Yun-Fat’s glorious lead performance; it’s all like butter. There’s a big, intricate shootout with Woo (and his editors Ah-Chik, Kai Kit-Wai, and David Wu) doing masterful work, there’s some workplace humor with cop Chow being on the outs with some of the time girlfriend and all of the time supervisor Teresa Mo, there’s Chow at a jazz club, and there’s Tony Chiu-Wai Leung doing a cool soulful (but smooth jazz soulful) gangster. It’s awesome.

Unfortunately, Hard Boiled runs two hours and change (depending how much violence has been cut out) and while the first act lasts a quarter of it and the next thirty or so minutes is still solid—as Leung has to decide whether or not to betray nice guy (for a triad) boss Kwan Hoi-San for obnoxious but successful Anthony Chau-Sang Wong while Chow enters the orbit, out for Wong’s head—but the movie runs out of story in at about the hour mark. There’s some plotting for the rest of it, but it’s really just moving bodies to their next stunt point.

And the second hour of Hard Boiled, which takes place in one location, which gets shot and blown up to hell as Chow, Leung, and Wong (mostly through his main enforcer, a very effective Phillip Chung-Fung Kwok) wage war on each other. See, Wong’s an arms smuggler so there are all sorts of neat guns and explosives for the fellows to play with as the bad guys go from endangering civilians to holding babies hostage. You know Wong and his guys are bad because they’re willing to kill babies.

It’s a really cheap way to drum up concern for the collateral damage, but it’s fine. The star of the second half of Hard Boiled is the pyrotechnics. Things are always blowing up. Yes, the infinite ammo mode gunfights are elaborate as well, but Woo doesn’t really direct them so much as execute them. The bangs and booms are the stars of the movie, not Chow or Leung. They’re just the guys who led the camera to the best places for bangs and booms.

The movie doesn’t even take the time for big bad fights—there’s more of one in the opening gunfight than anywhere else, even though Kwok’s in the movie a lot more than Wong—because it rejects the idea any of it can be personal. Barry Wong’s script doesn’t do character development or character arcs. It just does setups to action set pieces for Woo to execute. Leung gets some pensive alone time, which is fine and sympathizing (eventually and sort of retroactively), while most of Chow’s is spent with… director Woo, who also plays the jazz club owner, who used to be a cop too.

Woo is not a good actor and the scenes—outside when they bring the main plot in—are pretty blah. Especially since Chow and Mo are a really fun bicker couple. Mo’s usually around in the film, but never with enough to do. Woo doesn’t have time for a badass female super cop, just the one dude. And Chow’s good for it. Though even he loses his energy by the third act, maybe as he’s waiting for the scene where they blow up a set while he walks through it. There are a lot of stunts in Hard Boiled and you can usually tell when it’s not Chow and when it is Leung. Leung seems to be in the fistfights more than Chow, but Chow then turns around and lets them blow up the floor of a building with him on it.

Great stunt work, great action choreography, but Woo’s directing to show off those elements, not make it part of a narrative gesture or anything. The first hour’s just an excuse for the second.

Leung’s great, Chow’s great. Wong’s low okay. Kwok’s good, Mo’s good. Philip Chan’s fine as the big cop boss. His part’s iffy.

And the rest of the cast, eventual bang and boom fodder, sometimes for set decoration sometimes to motivate Leung or Chow, they’re all solid. Wong doesn’t even take the time to make them caricatures they’re so disposable, especially after the first act.

Hard Boiled’s sometimes really good, always pretty good, and just a little long at times. It’s got a lot of expertly executed action and some good performances, it just doesn’t really have much of a movie. It turns out it is, after all, smooth jazz.

Broken Arrow (1996, John Woo)

At one point or another, everyone in Broken Arrow tries very hard and gives it their all. Sometimes it works out, like when Samantha Mathis has her violence free stunt sequences or Delroy Lindo gets to deliver a lousy line well, sometimes it doesn’t work out, like Howie Long as one of the goons or… well, lots of John Travolta and Christian Slater. More Travolta, obviously, but also because he tries all the time. Slater doesn’t try as hard so doesn’t fail as hard.

Oh, and Frank Whaley. Broken Arrow is impressive in its earnest attempts at obvious moments; it’s unclear why they’re in the movie, like if director Woo wanted to do bland American jokes or if writer Graham Yost fought for them… one-liners to exit scenes with. Really bad banter stuff. And it’s all Whaley is there for and he doesn’t do any of it well. He doesn’t do the one-liners well, he doesn’t do the nerdy analyst stuff well, he’s a charisma vacuum.

But he does try and the movie tries too with him and they both just fail. So while Whaley’s a charisma vacuum, you do feel empathy for him in his plight… being trapped in this very silly movie.

Long, on the other hand, is an unsympathetic charisma vacuum. Once the movie pairs Travolta off mainly with Long, it’s like Travolta’s bad performance gets less annoying because not only isn’t it Long, you get to watch Long watch Travolta’s performance and be entirely incapable of reacting.

Most of the other performances are fine. And Travolta’s even got some moments. He and Slater both do this “I did Tarantino” thing with their banter and it does bring some energy, but it’s only with one another and it’s never consistent. Or good, really. I mean, it’s… amusing from a certain point of view. They’re trying.

And Broken Arrow’s trying often has some ingenuity. There’s a lengthy suspense action sequence in a mine because you can do a fairly impressive mine set on the cheap. The train sequence is limited but good. Woo certainly shows off his range when it comes to action settings. There are some gunfights (but not many), fistfights, and lots of running and jumping from explosion stunts. Broken Arrow’s glorious in its pyrotechnics.

The story—involving a traitorous Air Force pilot stealing a nuclear warhead to blackmail the Pentagon—feels more like a B+ movie plot than an A one, but it’s only 108 minutes and there are a lot of pyrotechnics credits to get through. You only have to amuse for so long.

Oh, and the Hans Zimmer score. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s for a video game. Besides Howie Long, Frank Whaley (sorry, sir), and a perplexingly miscast Jack Thompson, all of Broken Arrow’s defects are kind of charming. And it’s quite competently made, it’s just… you know… silly.

And Travolta’s kind of silly. Like, really, really silly. But tolerably silly.

And Mathis is really likable. Enough I wish they’d made Broken Arrow 2: Flight Control with Mathis and Slater teaming up again. They’re not exactly good together or even charming together, but they work together. Actually, that sentence also sums up Broken Arrow.

The Killer (1989, John Woo)

When The Killer introduces second-billed Danny Lee, it certainly seems like Lee’s arc is going to be the most important in the film. He’s a Hong Kong cop who starts chasing professional hitman Chow Yun-fat and gets in the middle of Chow’s fight with crime lord Shing Fui-on, with tragic results for everyone involved.

And while the film does track Lee’s perception of Chow over the film, it never tries to reconcile the Lee of the first act—who’s just shot a suspect dead on a crowded passenger tram, resulting in the death of a civilian—with the sidekick who has to figure out how to accept Chow into his moral system. Woo spends a lot of time on the burgeoning friendship between the two men, but only one of them is an unrepentant killer. Chow’s only ever in trouble because he cares when innocent people get killed. Lee just yells at the review board about he’s done it before and he’s going to do it again.

The internal character discrepancy doesn’t seem intentional—Lee’s cop seemingly just doesn’t believe in collateral damage, while it’s all Chow thinks about, whether it’s nightclub singer Sally Yeh or another bystander who gets shot while Chow’s trying to escape Shing’s goons. But it definitely adds something to the film, especially after Lee’s sort of revealed as an erstwhile alpha male who desperately wants to play sidekick to a real alpha (Chow). I’d be surprised if there’s twenty minutes of non-non-stop action in The Killer, but most of it is dedicated to Lee’s man-crushing.

All of the action is great. Woo’s direction, Fan Kung-wing’s editing, the sound, the music. Yes, the movie wouldn’t last more than two minutes of its present action if Chow’s guns weren’t on infinite ammo mode—the only time anyone ever runs out of bullets is for dramatic purpose, otherwise even when we watch Lee load a revolver with six shots, he’s got at least ten or more. I don’t think Lee’s revolvers ever actually run out of bullets, the scenes just end.

Lee’s pursuit of Chow also involves older cop, Kenneth Tsang, who’s Lee’s sidekick. The film juxtaposes Tsang and Chu Kong (Chow’s handler and best friend) as the two beta males–being a beta is whole arc for Chu—but also it turns out Lee’s not so much an alpha as a beta who just hasn’t found the right alpha. He thinks Chow’s the alpha. The Killer is technically a buddy action movie, but Lee and Chow don’t really do anything but kill bad guys together. And lots of them. When they team up, it’s thirty against two, whereas the earlier action sequences have Chow and Lee, independently, facing off against a more reasonable number. Like ten guys. Five to ten. You lose count. The goons rarely live for longer than a few seconds (save Shing and Ricky Yi Fan-wai, the super-hitman Shing has to hire to kill super-hitman Chow).

Meanwhile, Chow’s trying to help Yeh get a cornea transplant—he had to put a gun right in her face to shoot a goon—and it’s all tied up with Shing and Chu. The film’s cagey about Chow’s relationship with Yeh; it’s definitely protective and often seems romantic, but Woo intentionally keeps it opaque. And even though Yeh figures into the second act a whole bunch—she’s Lee’s pawn for a good portion of it—she doesn’t have much of a character. She’s a girl so she can’t participate in Lee and Chow’s gleeful chases, where they grin at getting to play with someone almost as cool as them. Well, at least until Lee realizes Chow’s the real deal.

Chu’s arc is probably the best in the film—it doesn’t avoid anything like Chow’s or Lee’s—with a couple great twists, which reveal layers to what’s come before. Great performance from Chu. Probably the best acting in the film. But it’s hard to say best performance in the film because Chow is transfixing. Yes, Woo showcases him to be transfixing but it works because it’s Chow. He’s inscrutable until you realize he’s not, which should make it harder on Chow (and Woo), but instead it’s just better once he’s revealed. The Killer doesn’t have a lot to be obvious about because it’s a pretty simple narrative with a lot of lengthy action sequences to eat up the run time, but its eventual sincerity is incredibly affecting.

Great music from Lowell Lo. The music does a lot of the heavy lifting on that sincerity. The music and Fan’s editing. The main song (sung by Yeh), which quite literally haunts her and Chow, is perfect.

The Killer’s outstanding. A little bit Western (especially the buddy flick aspect), a little bit noir, an unbelievably amount of blood squibs, it’s a spectacular, transcendent action movie.

Hard Target (1993, John Woo), the unrated version

There’s nothing spectacularly wrong with Hard Target. It’s a competently executed early nineties action movie. There’s a lot of good stunt work and some amazing pyrotechnics. Lance Henriksen is great as the villain. Wilford Brimley is in it as a Cajun assault archer. Almost everything about it is absurd, but not really out of the ordinary for the genre. It even tries for serious with a little bit of social consciousness–Henriksen is playing the most dangerous game with homeless veterans.

Director Woo is fantastic at making the perfunctory plot points seem sincere. He’ll slow down the close-up, leaving the viewer to inspect the actor’s reaction to something. Usually it’s Butler seeing lead Jean-Claude Van Damme do some amazing feat. One time he’s just standing there and it’s Butler in awe of the standing Van Damme. That scene is an example of something else wrong–but not spectacularly so–with Hard Target. No one’s willing to have any fun. Not even Brimley, when he finally shows up.

There’s no humor in Chuck Pfarrer’s script–at least no successful humor–but Van Damme’s character is particularly thin. He’s a man of mystery. So Woo’s impulse is to go for charming man of mystery and Van Damme botches it. Van Damme can’t even wink. He’ll make these single rapid eye movements towards a character and everyone pretends it’s a wink. He’s without charm.

But Van Damme’s not unbearable. His pseudo-Cajun accent needs work and he looks like a romance cover hero, not a down-on-his-luck street fighting merchant seaman. His stringy mullet is funny, especially once all the stunts start up and you have to wonder if Van Damme had to have the mullet because his mullet-wearing stuntmen aren’t willing to cut theirs off. And Woo’s direction of a couple Van Damme fight scenes is excellent. The fist fight isn’t Woo’s interest though; even when there are fisticuffs in post-first act fight scenes, Woo rushes to get guns in those hands. Van Damme’s not great at the gunfights, but then he starts doing somersaults through the air and seems happy again. Lots of flips in Hard Target. None of them convincing and they get old fast.

Luckily, they’re in the finale so it doesn’t matter. It’s all almost over.

There are some good performances. Henriksen, most of Arnold Vosloo (as Henriksen’s sidekick), Willie C. Carpenter; Kasi Lemmons is okay as the one cop. There’s a strike going on, which seems like it might be a subplot but isn’t. Hard Target doesn’t do subplots.

Leading lady Yancy Butler is pretty slight. Woo wants a lot of emoting. Butler emotes a little less than Van Damme, who’s got the emotional range of a rock pile. Thanks to Bob Murawski’s editing, occasionally Woo can imply something from Butler for a moment or two. It’s not like Chuck Pfarrer’s script gives her any depth either. Thank goodness for Woo.

Nice photography from Russell Carpenter. Nice editing from Murawski. Awful music from Graeme Revell.

Despite Woo’s direction, Henriksen’s villainy, the New Orleans locations, and the strong technical competence, Hard Target doesn’t click. The major action set pieces of the second half disappoint. Because the movie needs a sense of humor. Not Brimley drying gnawing at the scenery.

Face/Off (1997, John Woo)

A lot of Face/Off is okay. Nicolas Cage does a great job as the hero stuck with the villain’s face and makes it worth watching. The same can’t be said for John Travolta, who’s only a little better as the villain with the hero’s face than he was as the hero (the movie’s got a half hour plus opening act), and he’s terrible as the hero.

I haven’t seen Face/Off in many years, though I’d probably still assume it’s Woo’s best American film. It’s amazing what stylization does to a picture–the story’s so stupid it could have been Tango & Cash 2 (well, okay, maybe not Tango & Cash 2, as some of the scenes are really effectively written), but people loved it.

Woo didn’t make those scenes good, it’s pretty clear; he’s totally disinterested with anything nuanced. He’s also disinterested with getting good performances. Besides Joan Allen, Robert Wisdom and CCH Pounder, practically every performance is cartoonish and awful. Alessandro Nivolo, Dominique Swain, Nick Cassavetes… their performances make one wonder if the casting director was just playing a joke on the audience. Gina Gershon’s weak too, but more miscast than bad. Margaret Cho, however, gives one of the worst performances I can think of right now.

There’s a lot of good stunt work, a lot of gunfights–it’s hard to call them good, since everyone has bad aim except when shooting at unnamed very supporting cast members and it gets annoying, and it’s never boring until the finale.

Paycheck (2003, John Woo)

Didn’t John Woo used to have a style? I mean, I know he had birds and he had the guns pointed at each other, but didn’t he have some style? He’s got no style in Paycheck, which ends up being one of the best movies John Badham never made.

It’s a complete time waster, the kind of thing people used to grow up on seeing on TV, fueled by competent direction (without style, Woo’s inoffensive most of the time and only stupid–the birds–once or twice) and a fine leading man performance from Ben Affleck. While he’s never going to be believable as super genius (the idea of Uma Thurman as a PhD is as hilarious as Will Smith as one), he’s sturdy as an engineer.

Most of the supporting cast–Paul Giamatti, Colm Feore, Joe Morton–is solid. Aaron Eckhart’s not doing anything special here but he isn’t being terrible either. The script isn’t deep enough to let him. Michael C. Hall and Kathryn Morris are both pretty bad, but neither are in it too much. Peter Friedman appears to be wearing a lot of make-up. He’s not good, but the make-up distracts.

The script’s problematic–the concept isn’t cool as a near future movie and would have worked much better firmed up in reality–but serviceable. John Powell’s music is rather effective.

The whole movie hinges on Affleck being a movie star and Affleck is a movie star and it works.

It’s a fine diversion.