[A couple years
ago, I spent a
fun week AmericanStudying summer blockbusters—this year, it’s time for the sequel!
Add your thoughts, on these or other blockbusters, for a weekend post that’s
sure to set box office records!]
On a mixed merger
of Hong Kong and American films, and what we should remember regardless.
With 1996’s Broken Arrow (released in February, but a summer blockbuster
through and through) and 1997’s
Face/Off, legendary Hong Kong action filmmaker John Woo
made his Hollywood film debuts. In so doing, he also introduced the world
(although I don’t think we quite recognized it at the time) to a new style of
performance, now affectionately known as mega-acting: the style
has come to be associated most closely with Nicolas Cage, who certainly
has his moments of mega-acting in Face/Off; but in these two films was employed most
consistently by John
Travolta, who has likewise continued to mega-act in many, many many, action films in the
years since. Indeed, given the central role that both Cage and Travolta have
played in American action films over the decades since these two movies, it’s
fair to say that hiring and using them in this way might be the most
significant legacy of Woo’s American action debuts.
When it comes to
assessing the broader legacies of Woo’s transition to Hollywood filmmaking,
however, the results seem (to put it kindly) more mixed. To be clear, Woo didn’t
and would never need Hollywood success to be regarded as one of the greats of
late 20th and early 21st century film: by the time he came
to Hollywood he had already
made 25 films, across a number of periods and genres, including a handful
(such as A Better Tomorrow [1986], The Killer [1989], and Hard Boiled [1992]) that are considered among
the greatest
Hong Kong and action films of all time. Yet it’s equally undeniable that
his Hollywood action efforts, including the aforementioned pair as well as Mission: Impossible II (2000) and Paycheck (2003), were neither as
innovative nor as successful as those Hong Kong films had been. And by 2009,
Woo had decided to leave Hollywood and return
to Hong Kong cinema.
If we focused
our AmericanStudying of Woo on these less successful Hollywood films, though,
we’d be missing out on a couple significant points. For one thing, in this
globalized, transnational
21st century moment, American audiences can engage and have engaged
with Woo’s Hong Kong films just as easily and fully as they could his Hollywood
ones; indeed, by most accounts all current action filmmaking, American and
otherwise, has been influenced
by Woo’s career, an argument for transnational identity and community if
ever there were one. And for another, Woo’s Hollywood career included not only
all those action efforts, but also Windtalkers (2002),
a World War II action drama about the vital role played by Navajo codebreakers
in the Allied war efforts. Perhaps because Windtalkers
features Nicolas Cage and Christian Slater, stars of Woo’s earliest Hollywood
films, it has generally been lumped in with the rest of his American
filmography—but while it has its own flaws, it also represents the only major
feature film to date to tell this amazing and crucial American story. But to my
mind, it’s the one summer blockbuster through which Woo’s American efforts should
most fully be remembered, and another important part of his career and legacy.
Last blockbuster
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other summer blockbusters you’d analyze?
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