How one of cinema’s greatest-ever action stars failed to crack America
There’s no rule that says an actor needs to be born and bred in America to make it as a mainstream action hero, but it remains one of the genre’s biggest missed opportunities that one of the greatest ever failed dismally to make an impact in Hollywood.
Arnold Schwarzenegger – a thick-accented and disproportionately beefy Austrian with an unpronounceable surname – ended up becoming one of action cinema’s most enduring icons, while Jean-Claude Van Damme cracked the United States and earned the nickname ‘Muscles from Brussels’ along the way.
Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li proved that martial arts heavyweights from Hong Kong and mainland China were more than capable of holding their own and carving out hugely successful careers away from native shores, but for whatever reason, it never happened for Chow Yun-fat.
After all, this was a performer so cool and charismatic that Quentin Tarantino became so obsessed he spent months dressing like him, never mind the fact he’d headlined three of the greatest action flicks ever made in John Woo’s seminal trio A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled.
Yun-fat was hugely versatile, too, having showcased his ability to play a romantic lead and pratfalling comedian during his regular forays outside of running and gunning in Hong Kong. But there isn’t a single Stateside credit on his filmography that stands out as being anything other than completely and wholly unremarkable.
That being said, he was already in his 40s by the time he made his Hollywood debut in Antoine Fuqua’s undercooked 1998 thriller The Replacement Killers, not that the banal street-level story did anything to highlight the leading man’s radiant star power. The Corruptor partnered him up with Mark Wahlberg to much the same effect, with neither of them winning over critics or paying customers.
Venturing outside of his wheelhouse, Yun-fat starred opposite Jodie Foster in Anna and the King in an attempt to distance himself from the gun-toting persona that made him an icon, but being an overlong, self-indulgent, and unrepentantly uninteresting romantic epic didn’t do anybody involved any favours.
Comic book adaptation Bulletproof Monk bombed hard and was rightly savaged for being a paper-thin fantasy frolic. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is the biggest box office hit of his entire career but he was relegated to a handful of scenes as pirate captain Sao Feng, Dragonball Evolution is one of the worst adaptations of any pre-existing source materials there’s ever been, before 2010’s political thriller Shanghai marked his final Hollywood credit to date.
What makes it even stranger is that sandwiched in between so much studio-produced dreck that failed to catch fire or even come close to utilising Yun-fat to his fullest potential, he took top billing in Ang Lee’s four-time Academy Award-winning wuxia classic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, so it wasn’t as if he’d lost the things that made him so special to begin with.
Instead, it was a succession of poor choices and even poorer films that cut his American aspirations off at the knees, with the dozen-year detour delivering nothing that exists in the same stratosphere as his best work. Yun-fat is still unquestionably one of action’s genuine greats, but it’s best to pretend as though the whole Hollywood thing never even happened.
