John Woo Yu-sum’s final Hollywood films before he returned to Hong Kong in the mid-2000s were excellent – with one exception.
Here we look at the films made near the end of his first Hollywood adventure.
1. Face/Off (1997)
Woo made his US debut in 1993, but it took the director a couple of films to figure out how to integrate his style with the demands of the Hollywood studio system.
Face/Off, which starred John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, was the first – and only – film in which he succeeded in inserting his unique approach to action in a US film. The result rivals Woo’s Hong Kong classics like The Killer and Hard Boiled.
“For the first time, Woo has successfully incorporated his style into an American film,” this writer wrote in the Post in 1997. “It is a suspenseful work with a slick plot, chock-full of Woo touch-es.
“Woo gives his fans the best of both worlds. He makes use of the resources that American studios can offer to stage scenes, as well as investing his own visual style in the details.”
The plot is preposterous fun. John Travolta plays police officer Archer, who literally takes the face of captured criminal Troy (Nicolas Cage) so that he can track down the terrorist’s accomplices.
Things go badly wrong when Troy escapes, wearing Archer’s face. Archer must prove that he is really the police officer and not the criminal whose face he bears.
The action scenes are amazingly exciting, while Cage and Travolta give two of their most effective performances.
“John has put everything he has done in his Hong Kong hero movies into this,” Woo’s production manager Terence Chang told the Post in 1997. “You can see shades of Hard Boiled in the hangar scene and the church scene is, of course, undoubt-edly similar to the one in The Killer.”
Woo added: “It was a daring experi-ment for Hollywood for a commercial movie because I made it more artistic and stylised.”
2. Windtalkers (2002)
Because of the international success of Woo’s Mission: Impossible II (2001), he got a big budget for this unlikely film, which is essentially a personal project writ large.
Although it is a war film and in spite of its battlefield setting, Windtalkers is more of a drama in the classic American mould than an action film, channelling various expertly written US films of the 1940s and ’50s. The battle scenes are relatively realistic and lack Woo’s trademark stylistics.
Woo handles the many personal scenes, all deeply rooted in the American way of life, with unexpected delicacy, and the result stands as his most mature cinematic work.
The story is unusual. In World War II, the US Army – to keep the Japanese from breaking their codes – employed members of the Navajo indigenous American tribe to send messages from the troops in the field back to base camp.
It was an effective method – the Navajo communicated in their tribal language, and the Japanese could neither understand nor decrypt it.
“These Navajo people were very loyal, very brave and they gave up everything for their country to help win the war,” Woo told the Post.
In Woo’s film, there is a twist. To stop the Japanese capturing one of the Navajo and learning the language, the tribe was assigned personal minders, ostensibly to protect them. But the minders’ actual directive was to kill the Navajo if it looked like they were going to be captured, to safeguard the code.
In the film, Nicolas Cage plays a marine entrusted with such a task. As the marine and his Navajo “windtalker” bond under battle conditions, will he be able to carry out his orders if the need arises?
Woo told the Post that Windtalkers was intended to transition him away from the pure action films he was known for into a more human, relationship-based style of drama. Ultimately, that was not to be.
Cage told the Post: “He told me he wanted to do Windtalkers in a more documentary style, and make it a little more realistic. So it was another chance to try something new in a John Woo film.”
3. Paycheck (2003)
Woo’s last film before abandoning Hollywood for Hong Kong was a clunky science fiction movie based on a novella by old-school science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick (Blade Runner).
The US$60 million film looks cheap, the effects are expensive but dated, and the action is weirdly laborious for Woo. But Dick’s neatly conceived mystery manages to keep the viewer somewhat engaged and the film succeeded because of its intriguing storyline, rather than Woo’s direction.
The underlying story was expanded from Dick’s novella to include a romance and some deeper character relationships.
Jennings (Ben Affleck) is a tech whizz hired by firms to research their competitors’ products so they can make use of their ideas. At the end of each assignment, Jennings wipes his memory to protect himself from lawsuits.
Awakening from a job, Jennings finds himself on the run from the law without knowing why. To further his confusion, he has posted himself an envelope of inconsequential objects that aid his escape at every turn. It seems like he took a trip to the future on his last job – but what did he learn there?
Woo never had any interest in science fiction – he said it was too bleak and cold a genre for him – and he changed the themes of Dick’s novella to add hope and optimism.
“I wanted the film to be about how you can change your fate, and not just about sci-fi,” he told the Post in 2004. “I’m not really a sci-fi fan, so I wanted to change it. Sci-fi always presents a future that is dark and depressing, so I decided to cut it back by about 90 per cent.
“I want my work to be encouraging, to let people know that they can control their own destiny. Don’t give up – you can change things,” he said.
Woo was inspired to make an optimistic film after the suicide of Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing, the Hong Kong pop icon who starred in Woo’s first two A Better Tomorrow films and Once a Thief.
“It really made me think about the things that I do, the messages and concepts,” he said. “We really should be sending out positive messages – that things can always change for the better.”
In this regular feature series on the best of Hong Kong cinema, we examine the legacy of classic films, re-evaluate the careers of its greatest stars, and revisit some of the lesser-known aspects of the beloved industry.
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