john woo

Silent Night

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Brian Godlock with a gun

John Woo goes John Wick in Silent Night, his first US movie in 20 years, since 2003’s Paycheck in fact. And if Wick was all about people doing creatively terrible things to each other in beautiful choreographed ways, so is Silent Night, with the added gimmick that here no one speaks. Not that they speak much in John Wick, or in any revenge movie of any sort, come to that. Charles Bronson was once the king of this sort of thing, but now Keanu rules the roost, with many jostling for some of the action. Here it’s Joel Kinnaman, playing Brian Godlock, an average sort of guy thrust onto the path of murderous … Read more

The Killer

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Chow Yun-Fat as the killer

There’s a remake of 1989’s The Killer in the works, with Nathalie Emmanuel and Omar Sy in lead roles. But can it match up to the original, even with original director John Woo calling the shots. I believe it’s Emmanuel as the assassin in the update/reimagining, but it was Chow Yun-Fat way back when, as the supercool killer motivated to do “one last job” to raise enough cash to restore the eyesight of an innocent singer who got caught in the crossfire of a previous hit. Compare and contrast the relative importance of female roles. Blind singer Jennie, played by Sally Yeh, does not do much more than scream and whimper in the … Read more

A Better Tomorrow

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Chow Yun-fat lights a cigarette with counterfeit money

John Woo’s woo-hoo moment came in 1986 with the release of A Better Tomorrow, the crime drama that revived his career, created the ā€œheroic bloodshedā€ sub-genre and, ultimately, influenced the way action movies the world over would look. Itā€™s a simple story, of two brothers on either side of the legal divide. Leslie Cheung plays younger brother, Kit, a cop, while Ti Lung plays Ho, the older sibling who works, unbeknown to Kit, for a gangster. Woo and his co-writers, Chan Hing-Kai and Leung Suk-wah, are much more interested in the morally compromised Ho than the slightly peevish and almost dangerously vanilla Kit. What energy they have left they lavish on Hoā€™s sidekick, … Read more

Mission: Impossible II

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Thandie Newton and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible II

Tom Cruiseā€™s Ethan Hunt is back, tasked with saving the world from a dastardly villain intent on unleashing a deadly virus ā€“ cackle, preen. The ā€œthis time itā€™s personalā€ angle comes from the fact that the villain is a former Impossible-ist himself, and also the former lover of the woman Mr Hunt is now in love with. Youā€™d have thought it a mission impossible to make a duff sequel to Brian De Palmaā€™s all-action 1996 movie with the fine ingredients assembled here. For starters thereā€™s the $125m budget and Cruise, still one of the biggest stars in the world (he earned $60m+ for this). Then thereā€™s the damsel in distress, Thandie Newton, a … Read more