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Director Woo strengthens his stateside record with "Broken Arrow"

By Michael Zilberman
Daily Arts Writer

John Woo knows how slow-motion violence can somehow manage to be distinctly lyrical. He knows the poetry of blood droplets hitting a white wall. He loves the extreme sentimentalism that stops just short of being ridiculous. He revels in the soft-rock soundtrack, padding weepy displays of male bonding that, suddenly dissolve into twenty-minute bone-crushing routines.

The Hong Kong-born director of the recent film "Broken Arrow" has absorbed plenty of Western influences and, in turn, serves as an inspiration for a batch of young directors.

Quentin Tarantino may instantly come to mind, but as far as I'm concerned, Robert Rodriguez is much closer to adopting Woo's motto: Reviving hackneyed stereotypes doesn't require hip ironic posturing on the director's side, just very good execution. Of course, the latter is much harder.

Make no mistake, however; it's not like John Woo simply lives off Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone's legacy. He does leave his own stamp on the age-old topics explored by countless directors.

Woo's cinema is that of Hollywood made strange -- Western plots instinctively redefined by Eastern sensibilities. For example, a hero can shoot a villain in the back, if the situation asks for it -- a move that would leave American audiences in utter confusion as with whom to sympathize.

The director still sounds a bit bewildered by American standards, complaining in a recent Movieline interview, "You can't put too much humor in an action movie, or too much action in comedy. A hero never dies."

In "A Better Tomorrow," the 1986 movie that put John Woo on the artistic map in Hong Kong, his uniquely operatic visual style was already evident. Working within the limitations of the genre, Woo managed to infect individual scenes with something beyond the clumsy dialogue or basic narrative.

For example, the hero of "A Better Tomorrow" walks in a restaurant hallway that he knows he's going to be chased through later. In slow motion, he moves through the brightly-lit space, planting gun after loaded gun in flower vases. It's the pre-violence, the anticipation of a massacre, that makes this throwaway scene dizzying.

In "The Killer," Woo proceeded to wrap a basic search-and-destroy plot into a faintly registering gauze of existentialist melancholy. A police officer (Danny Lee) hunting down an assassin (Chow Yun-Fat, who is to Woo what Robert De Niro is to Martin Scorsese) slowly develops a barely concealed fascination by his unseen nemesis and the criminal comes to respect the man out to kill him more than his own bosses. This undercurrent adds a real gravity to the story; in 1995, it was shamelessly, though successfully, lifted by director Michael Mann in "Heat," in which Chow's role was ironically played by De Niro.

Still, Woo's stateside record remains spotty. "The Killer" was released into theaters for about a week, and even though it is the movie generally credited with triggering the national fascination with Hong Kong cinema, it impressed critics more than audiences.

It was enough, however, for Woo to get noticed in Hollywood and be offered an English-language project. In 1992, Woo turned in "Hard Target," a New Orleans-set actioneer that remains the best movie Jean Claude Van Damme ever starred in. Unfortunately, it's also the worst movie Woo ever made.

The problems arose from the director's decision to tone down his act for audiences who were not accustomed to his brand of sentimentality. As a result, Woo entirely erased his personality from the finished product, leaving us with a barely-above-average kickfest. Of course, the "Muscles from Brussels" didn't help much either.

Now, three years later, Woo returns with "Broken Arrow." Although written by the scribes who produced "Speed," it retains all the qualities of the vintage Woo. This time around, casting is no problem (John Travolta and Christian Slater, the latter reunited with "Pump Up the Volume" co-star Samantha Mathis), and some of Woo's trademark soft-core existentialism is back: The heroes, trying to prevent the big one from going off, roam the landscapes that look like the nuclear holocaust has already happened. The one big (and welcome) change is that Woo finally allows a female into his boys' club without automatically marking her as a victim or a villainess.

Regardless of whether "Broken Arrow" catches on with the public or not, John Woo's back catalogue is always available, and it's definitely worth checking out. The laser disc edition of "The Killer" even includes an amazing rarity -- a student project Woo completed for one of his film classes, a black-and-white, hilariously pretentious piece of romantic surrealism.