Hong Kong | Through the Shattered Lens

It was 1997 and I was in an outlet mall in Branson, MO. Being a film buff, I found myself looking for entertainment related books and noticed a book with Jackie Chan on the cover called “Hong Kong Babylon.” Jackie was enjoying some popularity in the United States at the time due to the financial success of RUMBLE IN THE BRONX. I opened up the book and started browsing through the various chapters. I saw blurbs about a bunch of movies I had never heard of and blurbs about a bunch of people I had never heard of. Jackie Chan was the only person I knew anything about. I put the book down because I saw another book about Hong Kong movies. This one was called “Sex & Zen and A Bullet in the Head.” I opened it up and saw some of the same people and movies mentioned in the other book. I liked this book better because it had more pictures. I remember this second book opening with a chapter called “10 that Rip.” It was their listing of 10 movies that would determine if you were a potential Hong Kong movie fan or not. Watching these movies would either open up that part of your mind that got excited about Hong Kong movies, or you would be hopelessly lost and not a candidate for Hong Kong movie fandom. As I looked closer, I noticed this same man in both books. He was usually holding a gun and looking extremely cool. That man’s name was Chow Yun-fat, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought I remembered seeing him years earlier on a VHS box at our local Hastings Entertainment Superstore. Not really being a fan of foreign movies at the time of the Hastings notice, I didn’t pay much attention, but now I really took notice. Chow caught my attention, but I also found it interesting that there were so many other movies that I’d never heard of, and I thought I knew a lot about movies. I bought both books and took them home with me. It’s no exaggeration to say that these books changed my life, and I was soon lost in a world of Hong Kong films.

No film exemplified my newfound love for Hong Kong movies more than THE KILLER, which was directed by John Woo and starred my new obsession, Chow Yun-fat. I was happy to find that it was readily available on VHS. I watched it on repeat. I had not seen anything that I thought was so awesome. The story is simple. It’s about a hitman, the killer of the title (Chow Yun-fat), accidentally blinding a nightclub singer (Sally Yeh) when he’s performing a job. Feeling devastated that he hurt this beautiful woman, he spends the next few months hanging around the nightclub hoping to have a chance to help her. He finally gets a chance one night when a group of young hooligans attack her on her way home. Chow steps in and beats the crap out of the guys and sends them on their way. This starts a beautiful relationship and the two fall in love. The killer has to perform one more job to get the money needed for a surgery that will hopefully restore her eyesight. When performing that last job, a tough cop (Danny Lee) finds himself on the trail of the killer and will do anything to get his man. John Woo has somehow crafted a story where Chow Yun-fat is an honorable “killer” on a noble mission to protect this young woman, and who is now the target of the Chinese triads trying to eliminate him. While trying to bring down the killer, the tough cop finds himself caught in the crossfire between the killer and the triads. When Chow goes out of his way to take a hurt young girl to the hospital, our tough cop realizes the hitman isn’t that bad after all, and the two men begin to have a respect for each other. There’s no time to rest though, as they find themselves having to team up to take on an army of triad soldiers armed to the teeth and out for blood.

I had never seen anything like THE KILLER up to that point in my life. The action had a style and flare that aroused everything I love about movies. I soon learned it fit into a subgenre of Hong Kong films labelled “heroic bloodshed,” a genre that I would go deep, deep, deep, into! The opening action sequence features the impossibly charismatic Chow Yun-fat dressed impeccably, taking on an underworld boss and his henchman, with two guns blazing in stylish slow motion. John Woo’s work has been endlessly copied by this point, but that does not take away how I felt watching this movie for the first time. I also loved the shameless sentimentality in the film, first between the killer and the singer, and then later between the killer and the cop. For a movie that’s balls to walls action, it has a huge heart. I was hooked.

I immediately began searching out all of John Woo’s films including A BETTER TOMORROW, BULLET IN THE HEAD and HARD-BOILED. After I watched those movies, I started trying to find every Chow Yun-fat film I could. I’ll never forget how I felt when I saw GOD OF GAMBLERS for the first time. I realized that Chow could do anything, not just cool heroic bloodshed films. I will tell anyone who’ll listen that Chow Yun-fat is my favorite living actor. After being a fan for 27 years, I still search the internet for any news I can find about a movie he may be working on.

And it all started at an outlet mall in Branson, MO, and when I first got my hands on THE KILLER.

While looking over at something to watch as the night wore on I came across a film that I still consider to this day one of the best action films ever made. People may try and guess that I’m looking at a Michael Bay flick (wrong). Maybe it’s a John McTiernan classic 80’s actioner (wrong again). Or maybe it’s one of those Luc Besson Euro-action flicks which became such the rage amongst the hipster cineaste during the 90’s (wrong thrice). No the film I’m talking about comes from Hong Kong and was the last actin film directed by the master of bullet ballet himself, John Woo, before he left for Hollywood to try his luck.

The film is Hard Boiled and it has so many iconic film scenes that it would be difficult to just choose which one I love. So, I decided to go right at the beginning and picked the “Tea House” gun fight which opens up the film. To call this scene awesome would be an understatement. The scene looks like chaos the moment the first gun goes off, but looking at this scene over and over one cannot help but wonder at the musical-like dance choreography in how the gun fight unfolds from beginning to end.

It’s not a surprise that the musicals of the 50’s and 60’s were some of John Woo’s favorite films and it shows in how he choreographs and films the scene. Chow Yun Fat as the coolest cop ever to walk a beat with the kickass nickname of “Tequila” almost goes through the scene like Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly except this time the lead is not dancing in the rain or with Ginger Rogers, but shooting and weaving his way through a tea house full of Triad gangsters.

Two of the coolest sequences in this scene would be the body grind down the stair bannister and then the final climactic sequence in the end. Also, the way Chow Yun Fat and the main gangster look as they shoot it out reminds one of samurai dueling each other right down to the very stance they sometimes use.

Michael Bay and his supporters could learn and thing or two from Woo and this scene.