Whatever the circumstances, if you’ve ever watched Hard Boiled, a 1992 movie from Hong Kong directed by a distinctive auteur named John Woo, within minutes you were privy to this:

And your action-movie lovin’ life was never the same.

One of the great Golden Ages of cinema blossomed in Hong Kong between the early 1980s and 1997. Director Tsui Hark once described that city as the Chinese version of New York: “Very business, very crowded, very stink, and people very nervous.” But with one big difference: while New York perennially writhes in the death-grip of the Democrats’ tax-and-regulate machine, Hong Kong is a capitalist’s paradise, harboring freedoms and opportunities unimaginable in modern America. This mindset isn’t just a part of their business or political community, it’s also reflected in their films. John Woo once described the special appeal of Hong Kong pictures:

They look so rich; they have so much energy. Hong Kong filmmakers have been trained to put everything into each film. They’re always creating new kinds of action. The films have lots of drama, humor, romance, action. The films are fun, like a roller coaster. People here find things in Hong Kong films that they can’t find anyplace else. Some people say that Hollywood films are made like a formula; they never mix genres. Hong Kong films do; that’s why people love Hong Kong movies.

In Hong Kong we have a lot of creative freedom. We don’t really care about censors because we have a smaller market than American films. We can do whatever we want; we never have any rules to tie us up. In fact, there aren’t any rules; we just try to make a movie as interesting as we can. We’re carefree and will try anything new.

Carefree is a quality missing from far too many American productions that smother audiences with predictable, ossified genre fare. Here are the authors of City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema, Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover, describing the way movies were created on the island circa 1992: “Budgets are smaller, generally between US$100,000 and US$1 million. . . production time. . . is roughly seven to eight weeks from contract to screen. . . Postproduction is often out of the question, and many films are completed days or even hours before their screenings. Typically films are edited as they are shot and, until recently, without synchronized sound — shooting without sound allowing for easier simultaneous release in Cantonese and Mandarin. Subtitles are often cheaply added and mistranslations inadvertently humorous.”

There’s a delightful sprightliness coursing through movies made in this fashion, a lightness and a sense of possibility. You become acutely aware of seeing new things, fresh things, audacious things, and the experience is wonderfully refreshing. In his excellent book Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment, teacher David Bordwell says that

Hong Kong movies can be sentimental, joyous, rip-roaring, silly, bloody, and bizarre. Their audacity, their slickness, and their unabashed appeal to emotion have won them audiences throughout the world. “It is all too extravagant, too gratuitously wild,” a New York Times reviewer complained of an early kung-fu import; now the charge looks like a badge of honor.

He goes on to ask the question that is often on the mind of people who have discovered the unique joys of this cinema: “How did cheap movies made in a distant outpost of the British Empire achieve broad international appeal, while European filmmakers bemoan their inability to reach even their own national audiences? How did Hong Kong filmmakers manage to create artful movies within the framework of modern entertainment?”

John Woo’s own Golden Age lasted from 1986 until 1992, and included as highlights A Better Tomorrow parts I and II (1986 and 1987, respectively), The Killer (1989),  Bullet in the Head (1990), Once a Thief (1991), and Hard Boiled (1992). A fun volume called Hong Kong Action Cinema by Bey Logan deftly describes Woo’s style as combining “the ballistic with the balletic.” Another book, Once Upon a Time In China by Jeff Yang, goes into more detail: “Bodies fly through the air, defying common sense and physics as they spin through a murderous hail of bullets; jaded cops bond with noble criminals, before they go out together in a blaze of glory; duels end in standoffs, with multiple guns pointed at multiple targets, each shooter waiting for the wrong move to be made.”

And, tellingly, he adds that, “No filmmaker has done more to shape the vocabulary of the modern action movie than John Woo, perhaps the greatest genre auteur of his generation (some would say the greatest ever).

The first movie in that group of modern classics, A Better Tomorrow, came seemingly out of nowhere to put John Woo on the map as an action director extraordinaire, and made an ex-TV soap-opera actor named Chow Yun-fat a Hong Kong superstar. Kids, toughs and Triad gangsters all over the island mimicked his clothes and mannerisms: a long duster, dark sunglasses, and a toothpick dangling from the mouth (a costume that would later be copied almost in toto for Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Ann Moss, and Laurence Fishburne in 1999’s The Matrix). A Better Tomorrow also heralded the advent of an all-new genre: an amalgamation of Westerns, kung-fu, gangster pictures, Chinese Opera, and classic film noir, eventually dubbed “Heroic Bloodshed” by the Hong Kong film fanzine Eastern Heroes.

A tidal wave of derivative films, many of them excellent in their own right, rolled out in the picture’s wake. The best of them matched Woo’s feat of conjuring up ancient notions of honor, duty, knighthood, and swordplay, for use in tales of cops and robbers doing battle in the neon-lit, concrete jungles of the modern world. “To me,” says Woo, “the gangster films are just like Chinese swordplay pictures. To me Chow Yun-fat holding a gun is just like [classic-era kung-fu actor] Wang Yu holding a sword.”

Many consider 1989’s The Killer to be John Woo’s (and actor Chow Yun-fat’s) masterpiece. It was the first Woo movie to gain international recognition, spreading like wildfire through the film schools, arthouses, and comic-book shops of America — anywhere young men congregated looking for the next cool thing. Author Jeff Yang recalls how, “Featuring for the first time Woo’s full arsenal of tropes and clichés — leaping two-gun attacks, tense Mexican standoffs, flocks of startled doves — on the American arthouse circuit it played to jam-packed crowds, who’d never seen anything like it in their lives.”

I can attest to that, as I distinctly remember first seeing The Killer at the Art Institute of Chicago circa 1992, dragged there by a friend panting “This you’ve gotta see.” As I passed the box office, I noted with amusement that the movie poster showed that the MPAA had given the picture an X rating for its unmitigated, if not egregiously gory, bullet-riddled violence. Unlike so many arthouse screenings I had attended, the auditorium was filled to bursting, and the predominantly male, college-aged crowd hummed with an electricity, a shared feeling that we were about to experience an Event.

To this day I can still hear the massive gasps and cheers that erupted throughout the picture. As certain scenes reached a crescendo, there was raucous, sustained applause of a kind that would have been more at home at the end of a powerful opera performance. It was more than knee-jerk admiration from a giddy audience — it was an expression of true gratitude. Soon after that titanically impressive screening, my friends and I headed to Chicago’s famous Chinatown district, scouring video stores until we found a place that sold widescreen laserdiscs, and purchasing copies of The Killer and other films at $120 a pop. There were no English subtitles, but we didn’t care — we were interested in the almost impossibly inventive camerawork and editing.

Little did we know, when sitting through the even more blistering and mind-altering Hard Boiled the next year, that we were in fact seeing the last great John Woo movie from his Hong Kong period, as well as the last to pair him up with Chow Yun-fat. When, in film school, our Chinese friends informed us that the movie’s original Cantonese title translated to Hot-Handed God of Cops, our expectations were high, and we were not disappointed. In the words of Asian movie scholar Bey Logan, Hard Boiled is a “mind-blowing cops’n’undercover cops saga. The film has all the best elements of pulp fiction, as well as the gunplay stylizations of the Woo-meister.”

Triads had become an enormous problem, with even the island’s movie stars so harassed and threatened that they staged a public protest against gangster infiltration in their industry. “The violence had gone too far in Hong Kong,” says John Woo of those dark days. “The gangsters were ruthless with their gun smuggling and brutality. The police had a hard time dealing with them because they did not have the strength or the firepower. I hated to see so many innocent people hurt. There was so much confusion. At the same time, Iraq invaded Kuwait. It made me feel so angry. There was so much injustice. So I wanted to make a new kind of hero with Chow Yun-fat, like Dirty Harry, who takes it into his own hands to fight evil.”

Whereas the director’s first efforts in the genre had focused more on the criminal element, by 1992 he saw a need to address the other side of the equation. “In Hard Boiled, both the lead characters are cops, so I am hoping this will encourage kids to become policemen!”

Hard Boiled cost four-million dollars to make in 1992, a paltry sum by Hollywood standards. But Woo put every cent of that budget up on the screen via an exhausting shooting schedule lasting an almost unheard of 123 days (by comparison, Woo’s first Hollywood picture, the 1993 Jean-Claude Van Damme actioner Hard Target, was filmed in only sixty-five days). The director himself describes the film as “Dirty Harry meets Die Hard.” and explains that “It’s called Hard Boiled because that was a tough kind of detective novel. I try for a similar style in this film.” A Better Tomorrow and The Killer were more lyrical and laden with the sort of tragic tone that often heralds “true art.” But Hard Boiled was more pure action, pure adrenaline, pure masculinity — in short, pure cinema.

Like The Killer before it, Hard Boiled’s relentless body count turned off audience members and critics alike in Hong Kong, resulting in only lukewarm box-office (it was only the twelfth highest-grossing movie on the island for 1992). But in America, it was a different story entirely: appearing in the same arthouse and museum theaters that Woo’s previous release had, it sent action-movie fans completely into outer space, and became a surprise darling of the festival circuit. When, soon after, both Hard Boiled and The Killer were released on laserdisc in the US by the prestigious Criterion Collection, both titles rapidly sold out.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers: John Woo’s journey from a slum-dweller bereft of hope into the most successful Asian movie director since Kurosawa.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

There’s a surprising number of solid, useful books on Hong Kong cinema — the signal to noise ratio is much better than in many other areas of film study. Among the titles referenced for this article were:

City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema by Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover.

Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment by David Bordwell.

Hong Kong Action Cinema by Bey Logan.

Once Upon a Time In China by Jeff Yang.

All are recommended reading for anyone looking to discover — or deepen your already significant knowledge of — Hong Kong cinema.

Looking back at The Karate Kid (1984), which turned twenty-five years old this week, a thought keeps recurring.

Wow. . . Avildsen made it work twice.

John G. Avildsen is, in some ways, a director of little distinction when compared with well-known marquee names like Spielberg, Scorsese, Nolan, and Tarantino. The vast majority of his movies are utterly forgotten by the average filmgoer — indeed, he’s been nominated for Worst Director at The Razzies three times. And yet, like Victor Fleming decades earlier with his twin successes The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind (both 1939 — read a great recent article on Fleming here), Avildsen has twice punched way above his weight, netting himself an Oscar for Best Director and giving birth to some of the most memorable moments in motion picture history.

His first triumph, made on a shoestring budget and a scant few weeks of shooting time, was a little picture called Rocky (1976). He had no money, no stars, no amazing effects, and yet Avildsen used camera, music, and editing to craft scenes of immense power and impact. Has there ever been a film, before or since, that ends on a more rousing wave of uplift? That takes such pains to create identification and empathy with its wide array of characters? That more patiently or expertly builds up to its cataclysmic swell of emotion? That has the guts and sense of timing to fade to black at the exact peak, frustrating our desire to know what happens next even as it leaves us too blissful to care?

Rocky did all of that and much more, and despite its fight scenes now looking like slow-mo hokum compared to the MMA-style mayhem that now rules on TV, it remains the most memorable and effective boxing film ever made. That’s really saying something, given the immense amount of solid competition the genre boasts.

But as other directors began ineptly looting and mimicking Avildsen’s style and innovations, it looked as if everything that made Rocky great would quickly become so cliché as to make a repeat impossible. We all know that sinking feeling when we begin perceiving the clunky wheels of the typical “Hollywood sports plot” turning — that excruciatingly slow crawl towards the utterly predictable final showdown, where the very last seconds of a contest are shamelessly milked until the hero finally hits the last shot/punch/goal/basket. Even the Rocky sequels couldn’t escape these pitfalls, and it would be hard to blame an audience for glumly concluding that Avildsen’s 1976 artistic triumph had spoiled the sports movie for all time.

So who would have guessed that, eight years later, Avildsen would essentially pull off the same trick again? How on earth did he once again make a Rocky-style plot arc work, without the end result becoming a pale pastiche?

He achieved this feat in large part by turning everything we remember from Rocky on its head. Ralph Macchio’s Daniel Larusso is played not as a thickheaded lummox, but as a fast-thinking, bone-skinny teen whose nasal Jersey whine sounds more like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer than Sylvester Stallone. He’s neither a down-and-out fighter with his best years behind him, nor is he looking to “go the limit” to prove something profound to himself. He’s just a kid at the very beginning of his adult life, who for most of the film limits his ambition to simply not getting beat up. Similarly, Elizabeth Shue’s Ali Mills is light years away from Talia Shire’s Adrian Pennino: rich instead of poor, charming rather than an ugly duckling, sociable not shy. And Pat Morita’s unforgettable Mr. Miyagi isn’t washed up or pathetically ambitious like Burgess Meredith’s Mickey Goldmill — he’s the very epitome of contentment and balance and wisdom.

Rocky achieved its verisimilitude with generous dollops of grime, rust, blood and profanity, whereas The Karate Kid is notable for its relative wholesomeness (note how Elizabeth Shue even wears a one-piece swimsuit to the beach instead of the obligatory teen-movie bikini). The music marks yet another telling departure. Rocky’s iconic score, by Bill Conti, was a mix of 1970s funk, heroic brass, and a choir acting as a Greek chorus, all combined into a sonic brew that still ranks as one of the most recognizable and rousing in film history. For The Karate Kid, Conti was once again brought in as the composer. But this time, in between pop songs like Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer,” he chose a light mix of delicate strings, only occasionally allowing them to burst forth into full orchestral splendor. For the training montage, Conti completely eschews Rocky’s reliance on trumpeting brass and instead opts for the lonely skirling of Gheorghe Zamfir’s pan flute, creating a more spiritual and intimate vibe.

Avildsen’s camera, for its part, is probing and observant, often making excellent use of telephoto lenses to highlight what would otherwise be a missed reaction or expression. He achieves true poetry in the training scenes: on the beach among the circling cranes, on the lake amidst glittering golden waters, and even in the fights and strategies that pulse through the climactic tournament. He also warred with the studio when necessary to protect certain crucial scenes, such as the one where a drunken Miyagi reveals his service in WWII to Daniel. That one adds a whole new layer of depth to what was already a touching and authentic relationship, and yet the studio wanted it cut, deeming it superfluous.

On top of all that, the excellent screenplay by Robert Mark Kamen (who distinguished himself more recently by penning the immensely satisfying kidnap flick Taken) consistently leads Avildsen down novel paths. The teen villains of the story (portrayed by, among others, Steve McQueen’s son Chad and Elizabeth Shue’s brother Andrew) are refreshingly human, at times even gaining our sympathy. Unlike the usual faceless, gormless teens in Hollywood fare, this group is delineated exceedingly well, and remain recognizable as individuals even when hiding behind Ray Harryhausen-esque skeleton makeup in a genuinely chilling night scene. Kamen fleshed out his bad guys so well that the Cobra Kais, led outside the dojo by actor William Zabka’s smirking blond-haired bad boy Johnny Lawrence, now have a sizable fan following among Karate Kid aficionados. One admirer even made a clever YouTube re-edit of the final fight so that Johnny wins:

Meanwhile, a band called No More Kings has made a song about the redemption of Johnny called “Sweep the Leg,” with a fun “Karate Kid continuation” music video written and directed by Zabka himself:

In interviews, Zabka has expressed pleasant surprise that The Karate Kid remains so alive in the popular culture, calling it a “sacred film” and noting that there are even Cobra Kai bowling teams out there. It’s enough to convince me that The Karate Kid II should have been all about Miyagi reforming the Cobra Kais, slowly rehabilitating them into good guys.

In so many ways, Avildsen’s 1984 film is courageous in the way it deviates from the instantly recognizable Rocky formula. How strong must the pressure have been on Avildsen to make the easy, safe choices, mimicking his earlier masterpiece in every detail? His resistance to those impulses does him credit, and hence to dismiss The Karate Kid as a mere Rocky clone is to do it an injustice.

But if there is one overriding secret to the success of The Karate Kid, it is the transcendent performance of Pat Morita as Mr. Miyagi. In 1984, most Americans still conceived of the East, at least in cinematic terms, as a mystical wonderland of Kung-Fu magic and swordplay. Hong Kong directors like Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, John Woo, Tsui Hark, and Ringo Lam were only beginning to create the explosion of masterful, modernized pictures that would eventually change the entire way the world looked at Asians on film. It’s hard to remember how utterly fresh a character like Mr. Miyagi was to 1984 audiences, completely unexposed as they were to the renaissance happening in Hong Kong. Fully fleshed out, with a compelling backstory and potent motivations, he was written as charmingly colloquial and disheveled, a character who could consistently shatter the stereotype of the “magic Asian” to raucously humorous effect.

Almost always in American cinema — to this day — Asian protagonists are depicted as cardboard caricatures at best and laughingstocks at worst. Avildsen rejected the initial front-runner for the part of Miyagi — the great Japanese actor Toshirô Mifune — and instead bet his entire film on the talents of a thoroughly Americanized stand-up comedian, one who in his salad days used to bill himself in comedy clubs as “the Hip Nip.” Comedians have a strangely robust record of shining in good dramatic roles — think Robin Williams, Bill Murray, Jim Carrey, Tom Hanks, Billy Crystal, Steve Martin, et al. — and they often manage to strike a solid balance between laughs and drama. Morita did exactly that in The Karate Kid: affecting just the right Japanese accent, leavening his character’s power and seriousness with just enough comedy, and always figuring out ways to make you laugh with Miyagi instead of at him.

If you haven’t seen The Karate Kid in awhile, you’re in for a treat — Mr. Miyagi was no fluke, he remains one of the most winning characters in the history of cinema. It was the role of a lifetime for Morita, who garnered a well-deserved Oscar nomination (as it happened, he lost that year to Haing S. Ngor in The Killing Fields, who himself became the first Asian to win an acting Oscar). Any number of others would have played Miyagi as either an embarrassing joke or an irremediably grim Samurai grandmaster. But in his every glare, mannerism, and pose, Morita elevates the character into a veritable Gandalf. Look closely at the scene when he bows gravely to a shocked Daniel (who has just discovered that his hated chores were actually important lessons), or when towards the end he smacks his hands together with such orchestra-enhanced thunder that the audience jumps. In those moments The Karate Kid — so often seen as an also-ran and afterthought to Rocky — breaks away from that film’s orbit and soars free all on its own.

So Avildsen pulled it off not once, but twice — I still can’t believe it. And if he never makes another great movie, he can still sit back and rest easy, secure in the knowledge that two of the very best fight pictures ever made have his name on them. That he did both of them on such low budgets should give hope to conservative filmmakers who assume liberal Hollywood will never give them a chance. There is nothing in The Karate Kid that couldn’t be accomplished on a micro-budget — all you would need is the gumption to dream up the script.

But will anyone take on the challenge, as Avildsen did those many years ago? Only time will tell. Until then: wax on, wax off. . . wax on, wax off. . . .