Part of Woo’s problem was the advent of American special effects capable of mimicking, with a few mouse clicks, the previously unique style he pioneered via endlessly inventive cinematography and editing. Soon anyone could make what at least superficially looked like a John Woo movie, and they saturated the market with mediocre simulacra of his imagery until it felt old and tired. This is what I suspect Werner Herzog once meant when he condemned the “worn-out images” which imperil our civilization’s collective imagination “because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.”

Then there was Woo’s catastrophic loss of creative control, resulting from his move to Hollywood soon after he finished Hard Boiled. He once wearily explained his momentous decision to abandon his homeland in this way:

I had been working in Hong Kong so many years, and creatively I felt limited and needed to grow and change. It was an extremely commercial place. All the movies were commercial and entertaining. Action movies and comedies were mainstream, and it was hard to do anything else. Artistic films did not have an audience, and political topics you could not touch.

Given his affinity for American movies and Western sensibilities, Woo found much to like in his newly adopted home. “I felt comfortable right away. When we came to Hollywood I found the people in this country were very kind, polite and respectful. It is a very open country. They are all reaching out their hands to the new talent no matter where you are from. They wanted me to bring my style to their Western movies.” Woo loved the Hollywood crew on his first movie here, Hard Target, and they returned his admiration. However, the demands of both the studio and that lord among thespians, Jean-Claude Van Damme, drove him to despair:

I never knew that the star had so much control over the script, over the co-star. . . Sam [Raimi] and Jim [Jacks] wanted me to make the film in my style, but somebody else wanted me to make Hard Target an action movie, and somebody else wanted me to tone down the violence. People told me than an American hero is not supposed to have flaws and he never cries in a film. He’s a perfect guy. And I thought, wow, that’s kind of boring.

With Hard Boiled in Hong Kong, Woo had crowned his reputation with a movie that, to this very day, remains arguably the most blistering action movie of all time. But with Hard Target in the States — made only a year later! — the MPAA’s passel of clueless, tin-pot bureaucrats forced him to cut his picture seven times just to get an R rating. Chow Yun-fat remembers Woo’s frustration: “They told him that, if he shoots five people in this scene, then he can only shoot two people in the next scene. He cannot kill seven people in one scene and then another seven people right afterward!”

In other words, the American studios courted the singular talent of John Woo — and then refused to allow him to make a John Woo movie.

Fools.

It’s not that he hasn’t been successful in Hollywood. Hard Target made $33 million, Broken Arrow $70 million, and Face/Off — where he finally had director’s cut — earned an impressive $112 million at the domestic box office. But the growing artistic malaise was palpable. By the time his Mission: Impossible 2 raked in $215 million in 2000, Woo’s films had become, to my mind at least, virtually indistinguishable from the work of the average American music-video director. The world-weary gravitas of Chow Yun-fat had been replaced by the empty-headed pseudo-machismo of pampered and coiffed metro-sexual pretty boys like Christian Slater, John Travolta, and (most egregious of all) Tom Cruise, while Woo’s ever-present themes — familial, moral, spiritual — faded under the glare of the Tinseltown klieg lights until they shrunk down to mere stylistic affectations, as moving and genuine as, say, Madonna sporting a crucifix with her concert dominatrix outfits. Most of his later output — a list that includes Windtalkers (2002), Paycheck (2003), and some TV stuff — is a pale shadow of the things that brought me to Woo in the first place.

Thankfully, we live at a time when foreign films are more accessible than ever before, giving us ample opportunity to look at old movies and remind ourselves how brightly those old Hong Kong gems still glow. “If some people see only the action,” Woo once said about his Heroic Bloodshed movies, “I say, fine. But I think if they look, they’ll see more. . . it’s also about me, about what I believe.” There was a time — as an ideologically lonely student in an intellectually stimulating but virulently leftist film school — when I cared deeply about what exactly a movie like Hard Boiled revealed John Woo to believe. It was the kind of movie that I could sense was buttressing my own worldview, even if I didn’t have the words to express why or how.

So what does Woo truly believe, anyway? In his interview with Woo that closes Between the Bullets: The Spiritual Cinema of John Woo, author Michael Bliss leads us to an answer:

Do you think that the traditional values that you cherish — such as honor, devotion, religion, family — aren’t very popular anymore?

“Yes. It seems that many people have lost them. I think it is my duty to bring all of these things back, these things that people have lost.”

With that in mind, would it be fair to say that more than anything else, you’re a religious director?

“Yes. I’d agree with that.”

The traditional values championed so energetically by John Woo should be of intense interest to conservative film lovers. Hard Boiled and its brethren stand virtually alone in modern times as cinematic defenders of what might loosely be described as Christian warriors — flawed heroes (and, in many cases, villains) who eschew cynicism and nihilism for moral codes based on ancient Bible-derived notions of righteousness and chivalry. Michael Bliss makes a wonderfully perceptive remark about Hard Boiled in his book when he mentions Woo’s cameo in the film (italics mine): “Woo plays a former cop, Mr. Woo, who runs the jazz bar, which functions as a haven of aesthetics in the midst of this brutal cops and criminals universe. In this church-like sanctuary, Woo acts as a secular priest.” That’s a revelation that hit me right between the eyes, and something that even Woo himself probably didn’t realize he was doing.

“I’m most influenced by the values of Jesus Christ,” Woo maintains in interviews. “Loving one’s neighbor, forgiveness, patience, kindness, charity.” That statement might seem laughable in light of the incredible amount of raw mayhem that drenches pictures like Hard Boiled blood-red, but Woo is adamant: “I am a Christian. I am strongly influenced by my religion. The church really means a lot to me.” In this Tarantino/Rodriguez-dominated age of treating every symbol and idea as just more grist for their pop-culture mishmash films, it’s refreshing to see Woo daring us to take his explosive action movies seriously. He’s unabashedly inviting a rigorous analysis of the Christian ethics on display in his pictures.

Consider what a film like Hard Boiled asks the viewer. What happens to those peaceful Christian values when they come face-to-face with a thoroughly evil, heartless, murderous, and implacable enemy? What part of that noble and beautiful moral structure gives way, and what replaces it? Is the result still Christian, or only a perilously perverted doppelganger? These are the kinds of questions that continually arise in thoughtful conservative minds whenever one watches A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled.

“I believe the good people always win,” says Woo. “At the same time, we have to understand each other and know the good and bad in all of us. I think that came from my Christian education.” Woo forces his protagonists to navigate their way through spiritual minefields, in a quest to achieve some semblance of morality in a world seemingly bereft of it. “In my movies,” explains Woo, “the hero must conquer his own inner battle between good and evil before he can win the outward battle with the ‘real’ enemy.” That he manages to bring brutal gangsters, self-assured assassins, and trigger-happy rogue cops (each with prodigious amounts of blood on their hands) through hails of bullets and piles of corpses to that spiritual place (and in stories filled with such mesmerizing imagery and visual poetry) is remarkable.

Hard Boiled has more death and destruction in it than any number of American action films, but strangely enough it manages to remain far more morally defensible and intriguing. The issues it raises aren’t just cheap plot points — Woo’s unflinching depiction of the eternal battle between good and evil gives his spiritual themes real teeth. For example, Hard Boiled sports a triad godfather who can’t bring himself to keep up with the demented younger generation of crooks, most of whom long ago abandoned the old code of mafia ethics he grew up with — and he pays for his conscience with his life.

Woo allows another likable villain — the crowd favorite, no less, the cool-as-hell Boba Fett of the movie — to come to an abrupt end at the hands of his merciless boss after refusing to gun down a crowd of innocents. And not only does this deliciously audience-pleasing character die, so do the innocents. On the surface, this seems quite cruel of Woo, almost an expression of anti-heroism: the deaths of the defenseless bystanders seem to render the villain’s noble sacrifice meaningless. We lament that Woo doesn’t even leave anyone behind to respect or memorialize the heroic action we witnessed, until we realize that it is we who are meant to know and remember what happened, that it is our own sense of decency and values that’s been awakened along with the martyred villain’s.

Like I said, Woo delivers spiritual themes with real teeth.

Meanwhile, both heroes in the film are faced with their own demons, accidentally killing people on their own side and realistically dealing with the mental consequences. “Sometimes,” says Woo, “when you feel a person is bad, there is good in there as well. This is a truth about human beings and a theme in all of my movies. I have always believed that good and evil are not black and white. They co-exist in people.” All of the thrills in Hard Boiled are over the top, of course — in real life any one of the action scenes would have resulted in the army being brought in to quell matters. But it’s meaningful, carrying powerful consequences both in the character’s lives and in the audience’s psyche.

“John Woo is a man of contradictions,” concludes Michael Bliss. “He’s a romantic Christian idealist who loves guns and explosions, he’s a man of peace who choreographs death and destruction better than anyone working in movies today. . . Woo is a difficult fit because he blends Western humanism with Asian attitudes. And like Kurosawa, he’s a man that knows that often, violence and justice cannot be separated.” Judging from the state of the world, our inner war between Old Testament justice and New Testament forgiveness and redemption aren’t going away anytime soon. Which makes me all the more thankful that, over two decades ago, a devout Christian director named John Woo chose for a few short years to explore those themes in such a startling and heartfelt fashion. The Hollywood technicians can mimic the camerawork and the style, sure. But for this bedrock faith in Christianity as a powerful, elevating and ennobling force, you still have to go back to the original.

This concludes our analysis of the potent, Christian-laced action extravaganza Hard Boiled. Come back next Saturday for the beginning of an all-new For Conservative Movie Lovers series, only at Big Hollywood.

Previous posts in the series “John Woo, Chow Yun-fat, and Hard Boiled”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

There have been more than a few versions of Hard Boiled available on DVD over the years, and which one is best remains a debatable matter. The best image by far can be found in the French edition (but alas, no English subtitles). The sound is fairly comparable across all editions (some have a 5:1 DTS remix, but many claim the original mono mix sounds better). Most of the editions use bastardized subtitles that fail to capture the nuances of the original Cantonese dialogue. There’s even a Taiwanese “uncut” version available that adds about five minutes to the final hospital shootout, but the original Cantonese dialogue is dubbed in Mandarin and there’s a different musical score.

For Americans, your best bet is probably the $11.49 Dragon Dynasty edition, which has decent picture, very good sound, and a host of supplements (including a full commentary by Bey Logan, one of the authors used to research this FCML series). UK readers might try the Region 2 disc available from Tartan Asia Extreme, which purportedly has the nicest image transfer aside from the French version.

If you’re one of those people who has never tried a Hong Kong movie, and who isn’t keen on spending an evening watching a twenty-year-old foreign film with subtitles, I’m hoping you reconsider, especially if you are an action movie fan. Every die-hard fan of Hong Kong movies started out as a wary newbie dragged by their friends to see something that they thought would be boring or hard to understand. It’s only after giving it a try that they realized just how much fresh energy, passion, color, and humor is to be found in those pictures. And if you’re the type of person who just can’t abide listening to a foreign language for that long while looking down to read the subtitled translations, you can always click over to the English-dubbed audio track and turn the subtitles off. That’s a purist’s nightmare, but in my opinion a far better option than not seeing Hard Boiled at all.

Part of a good film education is selectively trying out new genres you’ve always avoided. In some cases, the viewing will simply confirm your long-held suspicions, and that’s fair enough. But often you’ll end up discovering some thoroughly entertaining corner of cinema that you’ll wish you had found long before. Hard Boiled is revered as a great gateway drug into the world of Hong Kong movies, a hard-hitting action picture in the Rambo/Dirty Harry/Die Hard mold. If you like those sorts of films, do give it a try.

David Bordwell, writing in Planet Hong Kong, describes how

Many of Woo’s visual tics, like freeze-frames and slow-motion walks and glances, were already passé in the West, but the “heroes” cycle allowed him to integrate them with MTV dissolving musical segues, an endlessly arcing camera, wistful silhouettes against saturated landscapes, and glamorous, anguished players. The result was a glossy synthesis of Italian Westerns, swordplay, film noir, and romantic melodrama new to both Hong Kong and the West.

“We are all learning from and imitating each other,” is Woo’s own way of explaining it. “Hong Kong in the old days got a lot of influence from American movies, especially technique. We got a lot of inspiration from the West. We used Western techniques to tell a Chinese story. We just combined elements to create a new cinematic language. Now it’s the West that is borrowing back. It comes full circle. We are all in the same film family. It is a good thing, I think.”

Yet making a movie like Hard Boiled takes more than coming up with new ways to shoot a gun or blow up a building — it’s an intricate fusion of style, technique, and emotion, all geared towards expressing a thematic worldview. “Woo does not protract his films’ shootouts for fun,” says Michael Bliss in his book about Woo’s spiritualism, Between the Bullets. “The excess in such scenes represents the director’s attempt to bring the action up to a level of intensity that would suggest cataclysm on a grand, operatic scale. These cataclysms are also meant to represent a concretization of the powerful forces in the characters that are unleashed by betrayal, frustration, anger, and guilt. Woo’s violent scenes are his way of graphically depicting the perennial clash between good and evil, a conflict that must always strike sparks.”

When struggling to find words to describe the kind of movie Hard Boiled is, I’m tempted to borrow Simone Weil’s famous description of The Iliad: “The Poem of Force.” Like that ever-famous “conflict that must always strike sparks,” Woo’s characters engage in outsized heroics reminiscent of an Argive champion plunging into battle like (in the words of the late, great Iliad translator Robert Fagles) “a lion leaping into the fold. . . piling corpse on corpse. . . cutting the legs from under squads of good brave men.” When we see Chow Yun-fat tearing through legions of gangsters in Hard Boiled, nary a scratch on him as he slices through their ranks like a hot knife through butter, is it any less fantastic than Diomedes or Achilles doing the same thing in a three-thousand-year-old tale? Woo is using cinema not just to entertain or thrill, but to mythologize.

Other critics have noticed this in Woo’s work, as when Kenneth Hall describes Hard Boiled’s memorable one-eyed villain Mad Dog as “rather like Cerberus in Hades” as he haunts the bowels of the hospital that features so prominently at the end of the film. Woo puts the virtues and vices espoused by the ancients — their rages, underworlds, betrayals, and triumphs  – in modern guises. I see little essential difference between the two, and those people who feel Woo’s hyper-violence and enormous body counts are far too over-the-top have perhaps forgotten who we really are under the sheen of modern civilization. What looks impossible in reality is all-too-realistic in spirit, and the impossible can stimulate and inspire the world of the real, as the Greeks well knew.

Woo is actually given more credit for this in the East than in America, much as we like him on this side of the pond. By Hong Kong standards Woo’s action (if not his violence) isn’t very outrageous — instead, he is seen as an expert at using action to emphasize emotion. “For Woo,” writes Michael Bliss, “external action is almost always interior action, in the sense that it expresses states of mind and emotion.” Unlike so many action films, where the various set-pieces all bleed and blend together into one long mash-up of noise and thunder, Woo’s cataclysms are striking in their individuality, with each leading up to a profound emotional climax that drives the story. When you think Hard Boiled, you think Teahouse. Warehouse. Hospital. Each dazzlingly complex set-piece is brought to life, and then to destruction, with the precision of a watchmaker, and with crescendos of feeling that mimic the powers of a Stokowski or an Ormandy.

The great shots of Hard Boiled rival the best of any action movie ever made: Tequila’s face, covered in flower, blasted red as he shoots his enemy in a rage; his balletic entry into the warehouse, swinging from a wire with gun blazing; his double-gun standoff with Tony the undercover cop, each man one false move away from death; Tequila preparing to hit a bullet with a bullet to escape the basement of a hospital as filled with exotic villainy as any Bond villain’s sanctum; Tequila evading a veritable symphony of explosions as he saves a lone baby from the hospital. Great, great stuff, and all crammed into a single relentlessly entertaining movie.

“Action is the major part of a Hong Kong film,” Woo says. “The production spends more time and money on that than anything, so we could shoot or re-shoot or get more money and time to make the action right. In America, there’s never enough time to do a perfect action scene.” Giving Chow Yun-fat’s character so much to do and making him look so good doing it is a big reason why, when the British film magazine Empire commissioned a poll to determine “The 100 Greatest Movie Characters” of all time, Chow’s portrayal of Tequila in Hard Boiled came in at a respectable #33.

The famous climactic hospital scene from Hard Boiled, which lasts a full forty-five minutes, took over a month to shoot all by itself. It contains the movie’s single most famous shot, of a kind only achieved a handful of times of celluloid before by directors with names like Welles and Scorsese. It’s an expertly choreographed, nearly three-minute long handheld journey through the hospital, following Tequila and Tony as they maneuver through the maze-like hallways, clearing them of gangsters with workmanlike action-movie determination, and every bullet and explosion and action beat executed by the dozens of participants without any cutting away to different angles.

“For that shot,” Woo says, “we took two days to build the set, and then we rehearsed several hundred times. Then we took two more days to try and shoot the shot. But always we failed. The timing is wrong, or the special effect doesn’t go that well. I almost give up, but the crew and the stunt group and the actor, they all want to try it again. At last we got it done.” Well, almost done — in the end, Woo had to link two disparate takes together with a quick, almost imperceptible dissolve. But it remains one of the all-time great long takes in cinema history, and twenty years later it still leaves directors mumbling, “How did he do that?”

Of course, with Woo planning to make the jump to America, that reaction was exactly what he wanted to hear from Hollywood. He knew that Hard Boiled was the coda to his Hong Kong career, so he crafted it into a calling card that he could take to California. Perhaps that’s why he gave the story a happy ending of a sort. As he tells the story:

In my version of Hard Boiled, Tony Leung [who played the undercover cop] was dead. He sacrificed himself. It was a dark message and he was a dark character. But after I shot the ending, the crew and the actors were not happy. They were insisting that I keep him alive. Some of my assistants even cried. I could understand why. All that had happened in Beijing [during the Tienanmen Square protests] gave the people in Hong Kong a lot of sadness. It made them feel like the good person should stay alive. So we added another ending.

In this newly conceived finish, the shot of Tony lying on the pavement, seemingly mortally wounded, gives way to an image of him sailing his boat, living the dream he had earlier stated to Tequila. Some have claimed that this is merely Tony in heaven, but the bandage on his head seals the deal. “Tony lives,” Woo says, “and it gives people hope. Also, it was good for Chow Yun-fat’s character, it was a great metaphor that he never lost his friend. It really touched my heart that people felt so strongly about this Tony’s character.”

When Tony’s ghostly image sails away at the end of Hard Boiled, he may as well be John Woo sailing away from Hong Kong, that exciting city filled with the “perennial conflict” of light and darkness, his sails tacked straight for Hollywood. It’s sad that the Hong Kong industry crested and then largely withered after the 1997 takeover of the city by the mainland Communists. It’s always bittersweet to see a Golden Age end. But for the Hong Kong career of John Woo, Hard Boiled was one hell of a swan song. “Strong visuals, original action, sympathetic heroes and villains, and a story which forces these elements to the hilt combine to create emotionally powerful situations. This is what I look for and create. A film should bring out your emotions, whether it’s happiness or pain. I hope my movies will fill people’s lives and, through their expanded feelings, teach them love and honor.”

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our look at Hard Boiled by meditating on John Woo’s Christianized notions of heroism, villainy, and moral codes in a war-torn, blood-soaked world.

Previous posts in the series “John Woo, Chow Yun-fat, and Hard Boiled”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

“The New Cult Canon: Hard Boiled” by Scott Tobias. A nice look back at the film and how it holds up in the face of today’s CGI onslaught.

“A Sequel to John Woo’s Hard Boiled is in Development” by Peter Sciretta. This little item, published in March 2009, discusses the self-explanatory news given in the article’s title. And check out this follow-up with more information.

“The Films of John Woo and the Art of Heroic Bloodshed” by Anthony Leong. A long web article covering all of Woo’s major films through Face/Off. Lots of interesting ideas and thoughts on each movie.

“Hard Boiled Memories: Visiting the set of a John Woo classic” by Bey Logan. The author describes his visit to the set of Hard Boiled in 1992 and his conversations with the film’s director and stars.

The artistic pinnacle of his work in Hong Kong are his collaborations with John Woo filmed between 1986 and 1992. Those of us who equate the modern action movie to elder tales of heroic bloodshed such as The Iliad and the Norse sagas find these films to be sources of endless delight, and much of the credit for this feeling must go to Chow. In John Woo: The Films, author Kenneth E. Hall makes a trenchant point when he writes that, “Not much is usually said, in connection with Woo, about Chow’s contributions to character studies, but his efforts in A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled have created at least three memorable and distinct characters who are yet all of a piece, men of an essential integrity and heroism who rediscover or reaffirm their humanity in struggles with evil.”

This thematic tableau is red meat to conservative film lovers, the same stuff I was talking about when I wrote a piece on Taken here at Big Hollywood last year. But even to give Chow Yun-fat credit for all of this is selling him short — unlike many more muscle-bound action heroes, those Woo classics by no means delineate the limits of his talent or appeal.  Bey Logan, the HK film fanatic who authored the entertaining volume Hong Kong Action Cinema, insists that, in the wake of his collaborations with Woo, Chow became not just Hong Kong’s greatest action star but its greatest acting star. “Chow was the first Hong Kong thespian,” he notes, “to attain boffo box-office with vehicles as disparate as the tragi-comic Autumn’s Tale, the action-packed A Better Tomorrow and the slapstick Eighth Happiness. Chinese audiences just adore Chow Yun-fat in any of his many guises.”

As do many Americans.

Poverty is a theme running through the lives of both John Woo and Chow Yun-fat. Chow was born on Lamma Island, a blip in the ocean near Hong Kong, in 1955. He quit high school to get whatever work he could find to help support his family, and ended up auditioning for a place in the acting academy of TVB (Television Broadcasts Limited, a popular Hong Kong TV station). They ran a facility that performed the same task that the old studio system did in Hollywood: find new talent, whip them into shape, and put them under draconian contracts.

Chow’s contract made him an indentured servant of the studio for fifteen years, but it allowed him to build a following on TV in various soap operas and made-for-TV movies. A migration to feature films was inevitable, but like American stars like Tom Selleck, the movies didn’t quite know what to do with him, even after a performance in Hong Kong 1941 (1982) won him Best Actor at Taiwan’s version of the Oscars, the Golden Horse Awards. His even did a film with John Woo during these years, but as Woo was tied down to a formula their future magic failed to manifest itself.

But Chow’s screen presence stuck in Woo’s mind, and when Tsui Hark finally gave him the chance to follow his muse and make A Better Tomorrow, he fought hard to include Chow in a supporting role. His reasoning was simple: “Chow represents everything I value in a person: morality, friendship, honor, love. He is like an ancient Chinese hero who really cares about people.” This would seem to be a strange type of person to cast in the role of a death-dealing gangster, but Woo was working on a whole different level that the average action director. Samurai codes of honor, Christian elements of forgiveness and faith, and chivalric notions of brotherhood and honor were the coin of this realm, and as Chow puts it: “John Woo wanted someone who looks like a typical family man, but can really do all these things when he must. Not the typical kung-fu hero.”

Of course, turning the ordinary-looking Chow into a leaping, twirling, operatic knight-errant took some work. He didn’t possess the impressive acrobatics of a Jackie Chan or the kung-fu mastery of a Jet Li, but he did have a presence and a grace of movement, almost like John Wayne’s, that Woo could amplify with his unique editing style. Soon Woo discovered he was giving Chow a breathtaking dance of death all his own, and the effect was wonderful. Seeing the kind of film that A Better Tomorrow was becoming, Chow tore into the script and gave the part every bit of the emotion and passion Woo was striving for. “[Woo is a] very romantic and sensual director,” Chow says, “who puts a lot of himself in his films: love, human dignity, but also anger about the loss of tradition in the cities.” So just as John Wayne became John Ford’s mythical archetype and James Stewart became Frank Capra’s, so too did Chow Yun-fat allow himself to be molded into Woo’s image of a hero for the ages. As the director warmed to Chow’s portrayal, his part in the film grew exponentially until it had become a star-making turn to rival Wayne in Stagecoach and Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

A Better Tomorrow hit theaters as more than a movie — it was a grand coming-out party for a long-hidden talent that was destined to dominate the industry. Film Comment magazine put it best in a review that commented on Chow’s on-screen introduction in the film:

No scene exemplifies. . . star power more eloquently than A Better Tomorrow, when, simply by his way of eating street food, Chow tells us all we need to know about his character — we see this crook’s warmth, his cocksure humor, and the careless joie de vivre that will get him in the dutch later on. It’s a brilliant piece of screen acting — the kind that people emulate when they walk onto the streets after the movie.

Emulate they did — young men all over Hong Kong took to wearing Chow’s long Armani duster jacket, his dark sunglasses, and his suave mannerisms (the whole lighting-your-cigarette-with-a-$100-bill thing, strangely enough, failed to catch on in the same fashion). At the 1987 Hong Kong Film Awards Chow stood on the podium to accept the award for Best Actor, and the thirty-one-year old was soon in ferocious demand. He was now a bonafide superstar — but a Hong Kong one, not a Hollywood one. There’s a big difference between the two, as Chow discovered:

We don’t have very large budgets for the production, so the studio won’t pay a lot of money for hiring the star. So everybody wants to work hard for more money before 1997. Sometimes I’m so jealous that the stars here [in the USA] can take two, three years [between] movies. In Hong Kong, if you take three, four years [off], you die. You cannot survive like that. It’s tough, but it is the way that we treat ourselves to be a star. Sometimes everyone is proud of themselves when they make twelve films in a year, but on the other hand, there is a sadness, I feel shame that we have been working like a dog.

He had become, in his words, an “acting machine.” Hong Kong director King Hu remembers the frenzy that surrounded Chow in those years: “I was trying to get film financing from the Taiwanese distributors. All they wanted to know was: ‘Is there a part in your film for Chow Yun-fat?’ When I said there wasn’t, they asked: “Can you write in a role for Chow Yun-fat?’” In the wake of A Better Tomorrow, Chow made an insane ten films a year in an attempt to capitalize on his success. “My record was three days working without sleep,” he said at the time. “I know if I don’t slow down I’ll die.” It got so bad that, as Bey Logan tells it, “During his heyday, there was a joke that Chow was in demand by so many producers that, when he arrived at the studio, a crew from one film would shoot his face, another his hands, another his back. . . all for different movies!”

On the bright side, Chow was able to expand his artistic reach far beyond his breakthrough role in A Better Tomorrow. He experimented with a wide variety of genres, and found to his relief that audiences liked him in all of them. Chow’s Hong Kong box office during those years was nearly double what Jackie Chan earned in the same period, and in any given year he had no less than three films sitting in the Top Ten. A part of me wishes that we could get back to the same work ethic in modern-day Hollywood, with actors shooting far more movies but on lower budgets, where more artistic chances could be taken, and hence more movies like Hard Boiled could manifest themselves.

During these years of high-octane production and overwhelming success, Chow continued to make the films that would serve as anchor-points for his career — his collaborations with John Woo. The first order of business was a sequel to A Better Tomorrow. Chow’s character perished in the original, and yet it was unthinkable to forge ahead with a sequel without him. Woo solved the problem by making Chow’s new character the twin brother of the former hero. In 1989’s The Killer, Chow was back as another criminal with a code of honor and a heart of steel-tipped gold, in a film with a tragic and elegiac tone underlying the mind-boggling action set-pieces. “Intrinsic to the creation of this mood,” writes Michael Bliss in Between the Bullets: The Spiritual Cinema of John Woo, “is the acting of Chow Yun-fat, whose calm demeanor and soulful looks convince us that John has emotional depths that go beyond what is suggested by the film’s dialogue.”

It took their last team-up together, Hard Boiled, for Chow to finally appear on the right side of the law in a John Woo film, but even then his previous expressions of deeply conflicted morality were still in play. According to Kenneth Hall, Chow’s role as the rogue cop Tequila combines “basic integrity and compassion masked by a show of indifferent callousness,” as well as “a soulfulness expressed in his love of jazz music; an easy rapport with his fellow officers, making him especially popular with his subordinates. . . and, contrastingly, a kind of calculated but heated, almost out-of-control viciousness.” This is the stuff of Dirty Harry, Death Wish, Taken and other American classics of the genre.

“Tequila suffers guilt and fear throughout the film,” Hall notes. “Like ‘Dirty Harry’ Callahan or Wes Block, the Eastwood cop in Tightrope, Tequila is in danger of becoming his own worst enemy, of turning into the worst of what he pursues.” This subtext feels thoroughly American, which is perhaps one of the reasons that the later Woo-Chow films were far more successful in the States than in Hong Kong itself. “It’s the violence,” Chow maintains. “A lot of the [Hong Kong] audience can’t stand it. I, myself, don’t like violence. I don’t like gunfire. John Woo does. He loves the sound of the bullets. On the set, he never wears earplugs.”

Unlike so many other high-profile collaborations in the ego-drenched movie industry, the one between Woo and Chow developed into a warm relationship filled with mutual admiration. As Hard Boiled was wrapping up principal photography, both men were planning on making the jump to Hollywood, and so the picture was taking on the emotional resonance of their last hurrah in Hong Kong. Emotions were high, and Chow tried to think of a way to thank his friend for changing his life in so dramatic a fashion. He decided that the most fitting way to immortalize their sense of brotherhood was to recreate it on film.

“While working on Hard Boiled I never intended to appear in it,” says John Woo. “Chow Yun-fat is a very good friend of mine. On the last day of shooting he came to me with the idea that I do a cameo appearance. He wanted to create a scene between he and I that showed our true friendship to the audience. We made up dialogue and a character for me.” Woo was to portray a grizzled ex-cop turned bartender who, Obi-Wan Kenobi style, would offer advice and support to Chow’s Tequila. Woo says that “Chow Yun-fat wanted to show his respect so we made my character his mentor, someone who cared about him and gave him direction.”

Hard Boiled marked the end of the fruitful collaboration between the two men. As with most American director/actor teams you care to name, neither has been nearly as good alone as they were together. In Hollywood, Chow’s The Replacement Killers did OK, as did Anna and the King. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a major hit, making over $200 million, and he had a part in the third Pirates of the Caribbean film. Yet other films failed to make much impact. In one now-legendary near-miss, he was even close to signing onto the first Matrix in the Laurence Fishburne role, a perfect match given the influence of A Better Tomorrow on the film’s look. But he bowed out, and thus let a major coup slip through his fingers.

It’s been almost twenty years since Chow Yun-fat and John Woo have worked together in the old style. These days, they aren’t the hot new thing in Hong Kong anymore, they are aging Hollywood players who get together at their homes in the suburbs of Los Angeles with their wives and families, where they quietly barbecue together and remember good times. “Many of my favorite of my own films are not popular in the West,” Chow laments, but he is loathe to complain too much. At least he no longer has to make ten movies a year and work like a dog to survive. And he always has those magical years between 1986-1992 to look back on fondly, even if he does often wince at the violence his characters deal out on screen.

Next week, the production of Hard Boiled, and the innovative techniques that immortalized it as one of the greatest action movies of all time.

Previous posts in the series “John Woo, Chow Yun-fat, and Hard Boiled”

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Chow Yun-fat receives the AZN Lifetime Achievement Award: American stars like Quentin Tarantino offer an overview of his career, and Chow gives a nice acceptance speech in English:

A 1993 Interview with Chow Yun-fat: A bit stilted in English (although his accent is surprisingly good), but contains a lot of interesting information that I hadn’t heard anywhere else:

A few more books on the films of John Woo and Chow Yun-fat. Here’s a pair of titles that contributed to the material in this installment. Both contain profound looks at the thematic subtext of what many might see as outrageous yet shallow action movies:

John Woo: The Films by Kenneth E. Hall

Between the Bullets: The Spiritual Cinema of John Woo by Michael Bliss

He came into the world as Wu Yu-Sheng in October, 1946. Originally hailing from Guangzhou (Canton), in the south of China, his family fled to British-controlled Hong Kong in 1950 to escape the newly organized Communist government. Woo and his parents lived in a shantytown slum until a terrible fire destroyed the whole works in 1953, then survived on the streets for a year before finally settling in government housing. “The neighborhood had lots of drug dealers and gangsters,” Woo says, “There was gambling and prostitution. Every day I had to deal with a gang. I used to get beat up by a gang and I used to fight back very hard. I got in lots of fights. But I had great parents who taught me to go straight and to live with dignity and be a decent man.” His father soon contracted tuberculosis, and would die from the disease while Woo was in his teens. “Because we were poor,” Woo says, “I always thought we were living in hell.”

Throughout those grim years, only two things kept Woo’s spirit intact. The first was an event he now sees as miraculous: he became the beneficiary of an anonymous donation from an American family intended to send destitute Chinese kids to school. “I was deeply impressed,” he says, “with the altruism of the American family who paid for my education that my family valued but was simply unable to supply.” Soon Woo was in a Lutheran school and attending church, with the goal of both to “make decent young men and women out of us slum-dwellers. And, I must say, the school achieved its aim.”

When his teachers complained that his Chinese name was too hard for them to pronounce, he chose a solid Christian name, John, as a substitute. Soon, he considered himself “a fervent Christian,” going so far as to flirt with becoming a minister so that he might somehow repay the kindnesses laden on him by the church. He attended a Catholic high school, and made his first money doing work at various churches. “All of these things,” Woo says, “made me learn what dignity is, what honor is, and gave me a lot of hope.” Even after his father died, he remained unbowed and refused to join a gang, do drugs, or succumb to any of the other pitfalls of life in the slums. When asked how he managed to keep on the straight and narrow in such trying circumstances, his response is simple: “I had a great mother, and I was devoted to the church.”

The other thing that transformed Woo’s life in those years was cinema. “My mother was a huge fan of American classics,” Woo says, “so she often took me to the movies. They were free for kids. Because we lived in the slums I loved movies so much for helping me escape from that hell. There was so much beauty in movies.” It got to the point where Woo found himself cutting classes in order to sneak away to see all the latest pictures. By the time he graduated high school his mind was filled with filmic lessons learned from classic American movies, the French New Wave, the gangster films of Jean-Pierre Melville, the samurai films of Kurosawa, and much else.

He began making short experimental films of his own in an attempt to mimic the beauty he saw on screen, funding them by working as a ballroom dance instructor at yet another church. “I wasn’t a great dancer,” he admits, “I just knew the moves and taught people. But that made me learn the ability of the body to move, and to see the romance in physical action.” In hindsight, this peripheral education would have the same brilliant effect on his future filmmaking career that military drill training had on the career of legendary Hollywood dance choreographer Busby Berkeley. “As I’m shooting sometimes,” Woo says, “or when I choreograph action, I feel like I’m dancing. When I have my hero diving in the air, or shooting with two guns, it’s pretty much like ballet.”

Film school was not only beyond his reach economically — no such institution existed at all in 1960s Hong Kong. So after high school, he finagled his way into a job as a production assistant at Cathay Studios, and over a period of many years managed to work his way up the food chain, hopping from Shaw Brothers to Golden Harvest to Golden Princess. Eventually he became a director of formula martial arts flicks (one starring a very young Jackie Chan) and goofy comedies, but his heart still lay with those Melville pictures seen as a kid, with action and visuals filtered through a fertile mind’s eye chock-full of Christian imagery and iconography. “I tried to convince the studio to let me make a gangster film,” Woo remembers, “but they didn’t want me to.” As the comedies and martial arts flicks he made began to draw less and less at the box office, his rising star dimmed, and he found himself a has-been at the box-office before he had even the chance to do a single film with full creative control. “I was so very frustrated,” Woo says about the long doldrums of his early directorial career. “Some people even said I should go back to film school or just watch tapes and learn about film, which hurt me. You know, I do have my dignity. I’ve always believed I am a good director.”

Finally, in 1985 he got a break thanks to his friendship with director/producer Tsui Hark. Woo had previously helped Tsui through some particularly rough patches and lean years, so when in the mid-1980s Tsui was getting his own production company off the ground, one dedicated to the improvement and modernization of Hong Kong films, he gave Woo a chance to finally direct the kind of movie he wanted, a “homage to Jean-Pierre Melville, or Martin Scorsese, or Sam Peckinpah.” But this movie wouldn’t just be a copycat production, it would reflect Woo’s own outlook on life. “I wanted to make a film that would emphasize traditional values: loyalty, honesty, passion for justice, commitment to your family. Things I felt were being lost. . . .These are the values that I put in my films. My kind of hero fights for justice, for what is right.”

The result was A Better Tomorrow (1986 — the film’s original Chinese name directly translates to “True Colors of Valor” or “The Essence of Heroes”), a movie filled to the brim with guns, cool Armani clothes fluttering in the wind, male bonding, honor-killing, and Christian-inspired notions of sacrifice and redemption. And did I mention the guns? The movie was a smash hit and a cultural touchstone for a generation of Hong Kong filmgoers.

After fifteen long years, Woo had finally found his métier and become a bonafide auteur. He had also found an actor capable of epitomizing the noble yet conflicted spirit of the heroes populating his brutal, balletic action films: Chow Yun-fat.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, the ascension of Chow Yun-fat from ex-soap-opera star and “box-office poison” to Hong Kong’s answer to Steve McQueen.

Previous posts in the series “John Woo, Chow Yun-fat, and Hard Boiled”

Part 1

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

John Woo at Netflix. You can rent quite a few Woo items here, but alas, no A Better Tomorrow (1986) or A Better Tomorrow II (1987) quite yet. Still, what’s left on the menu is a rich list. From his early years, you’ve got Hand of Death (1976) and Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979). From his Hong Kong gangster prime there’s his masterpiece The Killer (1989), the gritty Bullet in the Head (1990), the lighthearted and playful Once a Thief (1991), and of course Hard Boiled (1992). Then you’ve got his Hollywood oeuvre: Hard Target (1993), Broken Arrow (1996), Face/Off (1997), Mission: Impossible II (2000), Windtalkers (2002), and Paycheck (2003). Finally, you have his latest triumph, the Chinese historical epic Red Cliff (2008), Woo’s attempt to make a film with the sweep and grandeur of Lawrence of Arabia. Have fun.

A John Woo tribute at YouTube. Courtesy of creator Ernest M. Whiteman III, here is a visual primer on why John Woo is held in such regard by fans as both an action director and as a filmmaker who possesses great emotional and thematic depth:

Crossings: John Woo Documentary. If you can stand the strangely compressed aspect ratio of this video at YouTube, here is a five-part overview of Woo’s life and career.

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. . . .