Five movies that prove John Woo is an underrated master
Calling a filmmaker who is revered as one of action cinema’s all-time greats “underrated” might scan as oxymoronic, but there are plenty more strings to the bow of John Woo than balletic, bullet-riddled gunplay and heroes diving through the air in slow motion while firing two weapons at the same time.
Obviously, he’s made some of the best actioners ever produced across two continents through his litany of Hong Kong classics like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled before taking his talents to the United States and doing much the same again with Face/Off, but a career that stretches all the way back to his feature-length debut on 1968’s Dead Knot has hardly been beholden to one genre.
Having recently made his return to American movies with Silent Night, Woo is still keen on testing himself even at 77 years old, with the Joel Kinnaman-fronted revenge thriller unfolding with barely so much as a word of spoken dialogue in amongst its various car chases, shootouts, and fistfights.
It isn’t all about running and gunning, though, with the following five films showcasing that, if anything, Woo is underrated as it extends to the art form as a whole.
Five brilliant John Woo movies:
Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979)
Indebted to both his mentor Chang Cheh and the influence wielded upon him by Akira Kurosawa, Last Hurrah for Chivalry would mark Woo’s last martial arts film for three decades, and he put the skills he’d learned on his previous forays into the genre to impeccable use.
The by-the-numbers story traces a pair of swordsmen without a master hired to help a man avenge his father’s death before the two hired guns form a close friendship. The themes of heroic sacrifice, opposite personalities bonding under the pressure of violence, and the controlled chaos of his action sequences are all on full display, with Woo’s early years in martial arts cinema laying the blueprint for what was to come.
The climactic showdown, in particular, carries several of the hallmarks that would become inextricably linked to his brand as a director, with the final stretch incorporating his love of fantasy and musicals in a sea of expertly choreographed carnage.
Just Heroes (1989)
Made in between The Killer and Bullet in the Head, Just Heroes regularly tends to be overlooked as a result, but its focus on narrative and interpersonal dynamics indicated that Woo wasn’t just a dab hand when it came to orchestrating explosive action set pieces when there’s drama to be mined, too.
More of a straightforward crime story by its strictest definition – although there are plenty of unmistakable stylistic flourishes that definite it as a Woo film – the assassination of an organised crime figurehead ignites a quest to seize power that draws countless warring factions into its orbit.
Essentially aiming to create The Godfather by way of the Shaw brothers, it doesn’t quite go off without a hitch, but the ambition is there nonetheless. It even has a family dynamic, with the three adopted sons of the slain crime boss seeking to ascend to the throne, even though one of them set the coup in motion.
Reign of Assassins (2010)
In just his second feature back in Hong Kong following his decade-long Hollywood sabbatical, Woo re-embraced his roots and returned to the martial arts film, albeit armed with the knowledge of how to stage action and create spectacle on a scale larger than ever before.
It’s hard to go wrong with a wuxia epic starring Michelle Yeoh in the lead role, but the filmmaker’s mastery of how to stage, pace, and let the choreography unfurl for maximum impact works in synchronicity with the star’s typically dedicated and committed performance to create an underrated martial arts epic that succeeds as a character study and sprawling action extravaganza at once.
As Zeng Jing, the seemingly innocuous cloth merchant trying to carve out a regular life for herself and her husband while trying to outrun the shadows and sins of their shared past, Yeoh commands the screen as Woo drenches the frame in a much darker visual hue than many have become accustomed to, albeit one that’s beautifully punctuated at regular intervals by the glistening of a sword.
Once a Thief (1991)
In his penultimate Hong Kong picture before heading off to Hollywood, Once a Thief is another underrated Woo gem that can slip under the radar based on its status as the inimitable Hard Boiled, serving as his final local feature before he upped sticks and made his way to America.
The film’s status as an altogether lighter, breezier, and more comedic heist caper underlined that Woo’s lightness of touch was also a great deal stronger than his grizzled and gritty action flicks had led audiences to believe, although there are, of course, a couple of standout sequences peppered throughout.
Chow Yun-fat, Leslie Cheung, and Cherie Chung star as three orphans torn between the two father figures in their lives. One is a nefarious crime boss, and the other is a warm-hearted police officer. The premise alone creates the potential for all sorts of light-hearted shenanigans and offbeat escapades, with Woo turning out to be surprisingly – and wonderfully – adept at fleet-footed comedy.
Red Cliff (2008)
It takes a special kind of movie to break a box office record that James Cameron’s all-conquering Titanic previously set, but that’s precisely what Red Cliff did when it became the top-earning release ever in mainstream Chinese cinemas to snatch the crown that Cameron’s Oscar-winning phenomenon had held for over a decade.
The historical epic was also Woo’s first local feature in the 16 years since Hard Boiled was one of the most expensive Chinese productions in history with a budget of $80million and ran in its complete and unabridged form for a mammoth 288 minutes. Excess has long been a word associated with his filmography, but in the case of Red Cliff, it proved to be hugely beneficial.
Applying the scale of his Hollywood experiences to both his origins in the realm of martial arts and wuxia, Woo then bolted it onto the framework of one of the most famous battles in the nation’s history in what proved to be a delicious recipe for success. There weren’t many big-budget period pieces to arrive as part of the post-Gladiator boom that could hold a candle to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, but the unadulterated Red Cliff experience is arguably better.
