John Woo -- "The Killer" and other works

So I was kinda lukewarm on Hard Boiled as I felt it was almost an orgy of violence at times (albeit a well choreographed one), but I absolutely LOVED The Killer. Granted its impact is blunted a little by movies that came out after it with the same "cops and criminals are only separated by motive" motif, but even so, there was so much to like about it.

What other John Woo should I watch?

pretty much everything pre-hard boiled. lots of highs and laws. a better tomorrow 1 + 2 spring to mind

thx just found ABT for $1.95 on amazon marketplace, placed an order!

lol if you don't like orgy of violence don't watch abtII. watched it and hard boiled for the first time in years recently. poor leslie cheung :(

I really liked Bullet in the Head, but that's probably the same level of orgiastic violence as Hard Boiled. Face/Off is incredibly silly, but if you can accept that, it's really campy fun.

hah I just watched BITH recently - didn't really click with me. the part in the concentration camp was kind of brutal/silly at the same time

I like Face/Off well enough but I don't think it's anywhere near the fun of any of his Hong Kong movies, and secretly I think I like Hard Target quite a bit more. Would love to see a Director's Cut of that one day.

has any other director gone from critically adored to barely-thought-about so fast?

His rep has definitely dropped off hard in the last 10 years. Combination of him not being best served by American constraints plus other directors ripping him like crazy?

ya i think his style was so specific, and so kind of on the verge of being completely silly, and that combined with diminishing returns from his american work has caused him to slip out the filmy consciousness a bit.

yeah his crit-praise has always seemed to have an element of western critics finding gold in unmined places, like "check out what this guy in hong kong is doing!!!" when really his films were just pretty shmaltzy shoot em ups

seems like film critics are always tryna find new regions to big up

But I think he did have his own auteur-ish style for a while there in the 80s - early 90s tho, and loads of Hollywood action movies in the last 15 years have been pretty obviously influenced by it.

just the action scenes though yeah? other than that these movies are just about bros stayin true to their bros even if they're not allowed to bro out with their bros in public while killin other people who aren't their bros

^^^ Brief history of the Western

Yeah, I still love those earlier movies, even if he hasn't done anything worthwhile since Mission Impossible II. Also it helps that during the mid/late '90s when I was watching them, it felt like American action movies had gotten really tame in comparison.

A Better Tomorrow 2 is also an orgy of violence. A Bullet in the Head is pretty great (esp. for an awesome Simon Yam performance.) A Better Tomorrow probably seems pretty dated now. Other than the Killer the great Chow Yun Fat HK action extravaganza is def. Ringo Lam's Full Contact which I cannot recommend highly enough.

"has any other director gone from critically adored to barely-thought-about so fast?"

Uh try plenty. Esp. directors who get imported from elsewhere and are suddenly forced to work under the constraints of Hollywood.

Chow Yun-Fat is one of the reasons the late 80s early 90s stuff just towers above what he's done since imo. Just an amazingly elegant and charismatic lead. I also prefer the action scenes in the hk films. although i was going to say this was because they were more over the top than the later ones, but really that's not true, face off is full of ridiculous shit. Must be something else about them.

tbh I'm not against movies with an orgy of violence, I like a lot of em...I guess I just haven't seen gunfights go on for that long and that over the top. I was much better prepared for The Killer.

Face/Off is just crap to me. Besides the inane plot and Nicholas Cage's scenery chewing, Travolta just looked weird and awkward during the ballet-esque gunfights.

oh and I think it also had to do with the fact that I was thinking "lol cop just got a hospital blown up and lots of innocent ppl killed"

I think the problem in Face/Off is there is the potential for all this moral ambiguity and weirdness but mostly what you get is Nic Cage doing a funny voice and some slow motion shoot outs that aren't as good as other John Woo movies.

very well said. of course I loved it when I was 17 as I hadn't seen many movies and thought it had all this depth. also at the time my friend had me convinced that it was medically possible to switch faces like that.

Then again, this is the same friend who once told me that computer viruses were "life-forming".

btw John Woo seems to love doves a lot.

yeah i think most critics would be embarrassed to fully embracewhat woo considers the trademarks of his style (christian symbolism, loyalty in a time of darkness, idealism, sentimentalism)

they just like the cool gunplay

well I dunno about that ....the Killer had a lot going for it besides the gunplay, it's just the other things aren't exactly new ground anymore. I can definitely tell Michael Mann drew a lot of influence for Heat from it.

lol michael mann characters actually reload their guns dont they?

http://3084615131657267755-a-1802744773732722657-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/nickdouglas/better_tomorow_1.jpg?attachauth=ANoY7cpcZLY3fXrlBKZ9F3wUF3UZX8Kkp-F0pGPKnRvKud59nlpULjvO3T4ByVADvrYYnP41aZpril8MFkjlc_8pRJwDH_4DskXJzc7QTiGYzKSH6b8H79L-tVXT93e_7EGkgDWLkreQ6p8KqloY8mUWBmLuwnUrRHUGTW2dGCgixl8fdhUF1FmsfUSwyAKZdkuHYAuwbbZBF_1gIANzR7a7ZlbK2I_Amw%3D%3D&attredirects=0

lol I did say "how many shells do these guns hold" when watching Hard Boiled. but to be fair The Killer at least addressed the concept of having an empty chamber :)

Has anyone seen Red Cliff?

YES

it's really good imo but the version to see is the 4 hr one and not the theatrical.

nice! yeah the trailers look pretty ownage. i'll peep the long version.

people upthread were talking about how woo fell out of favor, but the thing is that he never stopped being an awesome action director - dont get me wrong, Paycheck and Windtalkers are turkeys, but the action in them is still really well done imo

I'm not sure which version of Red Cliff I saw. It was pretty good either way.

Woo should never have left Hong Kong imo. Problem was with the scripts/personnel that he was given here not with him.

tbf the HK film industry is kind of flatlining right now

http://www.homevideos.com/revaa/9b.htm

i'm trying to find some decent blu rays or, barring that, good DVD versions of prime woo, cf ABT 1& 2, bullet in the head, the killer, hard boiled...seems like the most recent releases of any of them on blu ray are the Dragon Dynasty ones of the killer and hard boiled and the reviews make them sound like garbage.

anyone want to rep for any versions of these?

there are some japanese blu-rays w/o english subs that look good, i'm told, but all the blu-rays released in asia/europe/USA suck, so you're better off getting DVDs.

btw the japanese blu-rays feature the japanese versions which are sometimes different -- extended scenes, missing scenes, alternate footage, etc.

yeah i might have to just go back to the fox lorber DVDs, which didn't seem too bad at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xTOwmjPGbk

http://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-online/manhunt-john-woo-hong-kongchina-special-presentations/

so wit it

looks like a good candidate for a full 'john woo tropes' bingo card

range is overrated, as many people have been (correctly) saying recently

Framed accusation

don't get me wrong, the last thing i want from john woo is range!

you and me, we are not so different

*slo-mo white doves*

*walks out of thread in slow motion as doves flap behind him*

haha xp

bizarro and Tracer, pictured recently

https://filmfork-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/content/The-Killer.png

I'm going to have to rewatch all of these now aren't I

That new one has a tight straight-to-dvd feel.

Straight-to-VHS, early to mid 90s imo. Which is a chicken-or-egg thing, coming from Woo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWz1exXgkgI

http://www.strippedpixel.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/chow-yun-fat-smoking-a-better-tomorrow.jpg

Manhunt goes on the double-bill with Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans

Solid
Anyone seen the ‘76 Japanese “Manhunt”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimi_yo_Fundo_no_Kawa_o_Watare

the killer is the greatest movie of all time

otm

*walks out of thread in slow motion as doves flap behind him*

the killer is the greatest movie of all time

true but hard boiled is also the greatest movie of all time

big fan of the bit where CYF blows away this dude in a hallway while chilling on a sofa

THE KILLER (Woo, 1989) pic.twitter.com/0qKZtXB3bK

— Daily Squibs (@DailySquibs) March 10, 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjfawUNjdSQ

this movie has no dialogue btw

i watched A Better Tomorrow again recently and it holds up. it starts out with so much goofy comedy and winds up in such a bleak place. the violence is less balletic and really a bit more intense. i forgot the plot specifics since it had been so long since i'd seen it, but as soon as Waise Lee showed up i knew where the story was going. never trust Waise Lee imo (unless it's The Big Heat.) Chow Yun Fat gets all the accolades but Leslie Cheung is vv good, and Ti Lung i think is very underrated as a solid central performer, very quiet and likable, sad eyed, noble to a fault.

idk why I didn't dig more on Silent Night before I saw it but despite the interesting concept of no dialogue, in the end it seemed pretty racist. meh.

basically a white guy kills an entire Latinx gang, doing what the police (who are all minorities and portrayed as ineptly as possible) can't do. every single Latinx character but one is an amoral, one dimensional monster, and the one that isn't essentially leaves the film 20 minutes in.

Posted in the non-Criterion thread too but urgent and key here:

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/john-woo-chow-yun-fat-golden-princess-shout-studios-1236272850/

Here is more:

https://archive.ph/S6rQ6

Some of these are playing in nyc at the ifc center thing on w4