Mission: Impossible 2
Shanghai Noon
Memorial Day is an all-American holiday, but lovers of Hong Kong movies had special reason to celebrate this year. The box-office champion that weekend was Mission: Impossible 2, directed by John Woo, and the second runner-up was Shanghai Noon, starring Jackie Chan. Woo, the world’s preeminent director of action cinema, was working with a $100 million budget, and Chan was following up his previous multiplex hit, Rush Hour (1998). Unfortunately, Hollywood has always treated world cinema as if it simply doesn’t matter, unless there’s a possibility of turning a profit by remaking a successful foreign film or importing foreign talent. Woo and Chan may have cracked the Hollywood movie market, but their latest efforts are much different from and inferior to the Hong Kong films that got them noticed in the first place.
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At the same time he revealed his Christian upbringing by emphasizing the characters’ bitterness and ambivalence toward their brutal professions and by meting out a crushing retribution not only to them but to practically everyone they touched. The juxtaposition of violence and pious melodrama made the film a huge hit and ushered in what Asian film enthusiasts call the “Heroic Bloodshed” era in Hong Kong’s gangster dramas. The best of these films were Woo’s: The Killer (1989), Bullet in the Head (1990), Hard-Boiled (1992). They all recycled the characters and themes of A Better Tomorrow, but Woo’s camera work and editing approached the virtuosic and his sense of macho melodrama grew increasingly delirious.
Face/Off (1997) seems closer to Woo’s peculiar vision, and the film earned more than $300 million worldwide. Woo references started popping up everywhere: his Heroic Bloodshed motifs colored films as disparate as Blade, Lethal Weapon 4, and Romeo Must Die, and his hyperkinetic style was incorporated into everything from Con Air to The Matrix.
The result was Rush Hour, in which Chan plays a mild-mannered Chinese policeman teaming up with a brash LAPD officer (Chris Tucker) to rescue the kidnapped daughter of the Chinese consul. Instead of trying to close the cultural gap, the film exploited it for laughs. For better or worse, it marked the end of an era for Chan; it actually had a plot, which dragged down the pace, and his interaction with a physically inept partner reduced the screen time allotted for his physical exploits. He was, after all, 44 years old, but the high-flying stunts and impossibly frenetic pacing of his Asian films were severely curtailed.
