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

I just watched "The Killer" for the first time in ages and - controversial - I don't think it holds up very well. That is, it's still fun and/or funny at times, and the iconic bits remain iconic for the reasons they were originally iconic, but the action scenes are sooo incoherent, just in a "where is everyone supposed to be standing?" sense; I've seen some make an artistic/thematic case for the breaking of the 180-degree rule, but I dunno. I have to admit I was also amused/annoyed at how no one ever ran out of bullets, at least (ironically) when it came to handguns, though it's a petty complaint, since this is not unique to this particular action film.

Oh, and another thing that bugged me were the grammatical errors in the subtitles. We talked about it a bit on the boutique DVD thread, but I'm not talking about interpretation or translation, just outright English grammar mistakes, as if no one had given the subtitles a single check. And this is afaict the new Shout! transfer, the one streaming on Criterion. Just lame/lazy.

I had a similar reaction to Hard Boiled. The opening gunfight in the teahouse is borderline incoherent. It has a couple of iconic moments but it's very hard to mentally work out what's going on. Although it's blackly comic how a police raid on an arms deal basically ends with the entire staff and most of the customers being killed in the crossfire:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wYCh5nxyCI

It's like the opposite of good policing. It feels as if John Woo had seen Robocop and Total Recall, and he wanted to have something like the scene in Recall where Arnie uses a man as a bullet shield, and it's horrible at first and then hilarious because there's so much blood! And then he throws the body at Michael Ironside and runs off. When you're twelve years old that kind of thing is awesome. I mean, they shoot him dozens of times and it's like SPLUTCH SPLUTCH SPLUTCH! Blood goes everywhere. And his clothes are all ripped up.

But on the other hand there's a scene later on in Hard Boiled where the camera follows our heroes through a hospital, and it only has one cut, and that makes a lot more sense. I have the impression that when Hollywood directors drew inspiration from John Woo it was specifically that scene they were thinking of. But what was the next thing in action cinema? Saving Private Ryan and The Bourne Identity, which borrowed more from cinema vérité, e.g. The Battle of Algiers than they did from John Woo.

ha i just watched the killer and hard boiled for the first time and my main takeaway was "there's definitely some cool stuff in these but the amount of shooting is exhausting"

counterpoint: i wouldn't mind even more shooting and the only time characters really should be reloading in these movies is when they're taking a dramatic pause during a warehouse shootout and having intense conversations with adversaries doing the same thing on the other side of a wall providing temporary cover

For me the problem is less too much shooting or incoherence but too many red shirts – there are just so many interchangeable goons in each action scene who only exist as cannon fodder, I just can’t feel much tension that way.

I never could figure out if Chow Yun-Fat was supposed to kill everyone in the nightclub at the beginning or if he was just a really shitty hitman.

It is also a waste of Sally Yeh who is very good in Shanghai Blues and Peking Opera Blues.

I still like it better than the other Woo films (I like the pre-hospital part of Hard Boiled). Bullet in the Head is a slog. I tried three times over the years albeit with an edited version and liked it less each time. There are some good bits in the middle mainly anything with Simon Yam and the Monkees cover/restroom hit, but the problem is Woo’s sensibility is wrong for the material. It needs a Huston or Peckinpah who could bring a sardonic edge and realize these guys are actually assholes, but Woo seems to think the fraying of their barely-there friendship is tragic. I mean, leaving your wife on your wedding night to kill some guy with your buddies?

I've got no problem with all the shooting. Just, like, make a minimal effort to show them switching guns or something. Endless bullets just makes it feel like an old western. Never out of ammo, everything makes the same ricochet noise. Action movies are of course an evolution, but something I liked about the John Wick movies is that as silly as they are, they always found a way to keep him armed. Like, literally rooms full of guns, and he's always grabbing something new. (And as far as red shirts go, "Wick" solved that problem as well by inventing this world populated by hundreds of freelance assassins.) In fact "The Killer" has rooms full of guns, too! So show them constantly grabbing new ones or something. Though I suppose if your action choreography has no sense of space or direction it would be challenging to shoehorn in any logic.

I dunno, it felt like a proof of concept project, like (the heavily John Woo influenced) "El Mariachi" or something like that.

xpost

love bullet in the head. so emotional. esp that car shootout at the end. i get what you mean but imo you gotta suspend disbelief with woo or you just aren't gonna have a very fun time with this stuff. which is fine, not for eveybody, etc!

this might be a cultural difference, one has to recalibrate expectations when watching a lot of these Hong Kong action films because the emotions are simply expressed more nakedly, more vulnerably, and the stakes are a bit different.

These movies largely hold up in terms of craft and I think bringing the heightened emotions into the mix is very much a pure expression. In terms of the action, I think it’s all pretty clean and clear, it’s not The Mission by Johnnie To, but it’s not drenched in darkness, and the editing is pretty superb. You can track every bullet from the barrel to its destination much of the time, even in the most heavy gunfights.

One thing I always appreciate is there’s a moment where Chow pulls up next to Shing Fui-On and blasts a huge chunk of metal from the door frame of his car, and the first time I saw it years ago, I thought he’d shot his whole arm off.

Woo movies always have these gorgeous moments of gunplay which are seemingly minor shots elevated to a gorgeous visual. Tony Leung rolling through a half completed car while Chow Yun Fat destroys it with a shotgun and the interior explodes all around him. Chow diving to avoid a shotgun blast on a dock while it wrecks a post next to him. Philip Kwok advancing on Chow while emptying his assault weapon and an endless number of shells eject to the ground around him.

The thing about the teahouse shootout is, that place was an iconic Hong Kong landmark, Woo heard it was closing down and last minute went "fuck, let's film a scene there so at least there'll be a document of it". This is why the scene doesn't relate to anything else in the plot, and perhaps why the action may seem rough in comparison with the hospital scene (though can't say I noticed). I find that incredibly moving, what is cinema but a vain attempt to grant immortality to our spaces?

what was the next thing in action cinema?

A little movie called The Matrix.

That's an amazing fact re: tea room. And its such a beautiful opening.

UK PSA - there’s a whole bunch of woo movies on tubi

That tea room shootout is really something. It relates to the plot in terms of establishing Tequila as a character, the hot-handed god of cops who shoots firsts and asks questions later, accidentally killing a guy his boss was trying to bring in alive. It’s really just a foreshadowing device for Tequila’s later initial pursuit of Alan. The earlier scenes in the film make a little more sense when you realize that at some point during the production, Woo shifted gears and turned Alan from a psychotic villain, and into a very conflicted cop who was so deep undercover it was wrecking him. The shift actually works as a red herring, in the end. And of course the only reason tequila doesn’t repeat history and kill someone he’s not supposed to is because he runs out of bullets lol.

The thing about the teahouse shootout is, that place was an iconic Hong Kong landmark, Woo heard it was closing down and last minute went "fuck, let's film a scene there so at least there'll be a document of it".

this is an extremely cool ver of it but this kinda thing was super common with hk productions of that era, i think - a lot of improvising with what happens to be available at the moment, eg johnnie to has said that the shootout in the mall in the mission all happened because they found out they could shoot there that night and wrote it and shot it in a day. so, that scrappy way of filming is prob a factor in the continuity quirks and tonal shifts people sometimes point out with these films.

yeah and i think it's all part of the beauty of these films, this sort of go for broke creativity and utilizing everything available to you, and finding a way to incorporate every idea that's possessed you into the story narrative.

I found this film nerd online talking about "Hard Boiled" specifically:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geFtGOf2ktM

"Hard Boiled" is better than "The Killer," which does feel more like a scrappy DIY indie by comparison. If anything, it's the hospital sequence, which as this video points out goes somewhat counter to a lot of Woo's editing instincts, where imo we most see Woo's lasting influence on action movies up to the present. Spitballing here, but after the (Jackie Chan vet) Yuen Woo-ping wire-work interlude of "The Matrix" and I guess "Crouching Tiger" and "Kill Bill" we get "The Bourne Identity" and its shaky-cam sequels, whose action sequences owe a lot to Woo's more visceral approach. And then "The Raid" pushes things even further in that direction and sets a new high bar, which the Wick movies sort of slickly if creatively riff on.

"this is an extremely cool ver of it but this kinda thing was super common with hk productions of that era, i think - a lot of improvising with what happens to be available at the moment, eg johnnie to has said that the shootout in the mall in the mission all happened because they found out they could shoot there that night and wrote it and shot it in a day. so, that scrappy way of filming is prob a factor in the continuity quirks and tonal shifts people sometimes point out with these films"

My understanding is this is basically how Chungking Express came about - Wong Kar-wai was at a loose end, Brigitte Lin agreed to do it because she wouldn't have to spend two hours putting on make-up and the costume consisted of a wig, sunglasses, and a trenchoat, the two male leads were cast as policemen entirely because the production company wanted to fund a cop film, one of the locations was the cinematographer's flat etc. It has a real "let's make a film right here" feeling, which probably explains why Western film directors love that film. Quentin Tarantino loved it, but that might be because it has a close-up shot of Brigitte Lin's shoes. I can't remember if the film has any shots of Faye Wong's feet.

I want to stress that my knowledge of Hong Kong cinema is vast and all-encompassing. The only two examples I've given so far are Hard Boiled and Chungking Express - as if they were the only two Hong Kong films I've seen - but in reality I have an entire section of my film shelf filled with films from Hong Kong, on vinyl. With obi strips.

Chungking Express is a pretty terrible heroic bloodshed film, though.

"A little movie called The Matrix"

Oh yeah. It's as if I was mentally blanking out the late 1990s. Bourne Identity came out in 2002, but before that there was of course Face/Off, The Matrix, Mission Impossible 2, Die Another Day etc. Bourne felt like a reaction against them, not so much Hard Boiled. I do remember going back to the classic 1980s Hollywood action films and being disappointed that the action mostly consisted of the hero standing still, firing a gun at the camera, and then a cut to an extra being shot, and then cut back to the hero firing his gun, then cut to another extra, etc. It felt ponderous in comparison, as if the two scenes had been shot separately, which presumably they had.

Another thing about "Hard Boiled" (which is, as they they say, "the stuff") is that Woo not only clearly had been influenced by Verhoeven (otm) but also "Die Hard." In fact, really, "Hard Boiled" would have been better if the entire movie were set in the hospital under siege and not just the carnage-and-camp finale.

I'd never seen "City on Fire" (not Woo) but of course knew about it as being notoriously "ripped off" by "Reservoir Dogs." Which it (barely) is, just more or less one scene. The rest of the movie isn't particularly good, but Chow Yun Fat is pretty fun in it. And speaking of "Hard Boiled," is Tony Leung bad in anything?