PERSONAL FAVES: Bullet in the Head

‘Bullet in the Head’ was almost a very different film. John Woo originally conceived it as a prequel to his immensely successful ‘A Better Tomorrow’ and ‘A Better Tomorrow Part 2’. Two things changed the shape, scope and sheer ambition of the film. The ‘Better Tomorrow’ films were produced by Tsui Hark, with whom Woo found it increasingly difficult to work. Parting ways, Hark rushed ‘A Better Tomorrow Part 3’ into production while Woo was left to reconfigure his concept of the prequel. In reapproaching it as a stand-alone film, he was inspired – if that’s the right word; “angered” would probably be more apposite – by the violence demonstrated towards the protestors in Tiananmen Square. Accordingly, ‘Bullet in the Head’ gained a political subtext, Woo setting the first act in Hong Kong in 1967, the riots and heavy-handed military response a grim reflection of then contemporary events.

I first saw ‘Bullet in the Head’ on the big screen at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema in the mid 90s after the mainstream success of ‘Hard Boiled’ had given Woo’s back catalogue a new lease of life in terms of their overseas distribution. I saw it in a subtitled but still highly Anglicized version where the main characters were called Ben, Paul and Frank; I then bought it on VHS in the MIA release with those selfsame subtitles and watched it to death over the next half decade. Revisiting it last night on DVD, with the character names in their correct appellation – respectively, Ah Bee, Little Wing and Fai – I found it a bit disconcerting that Ben, Paul and Frank weren’t Ben, Paul and Frank any more. So please indulge me, for the purposes of this review, in sticking with the horribly unrealistic western names, otherwise I’d be checking IMDb every other sentence and I’d never get this thing written.

So: it’s Hong Kong, 1967 and Ben (Tony Leung), Paul (Waise Lee) and Frank (Jacky Cheung) are best buds who enjoy chasing girls, riding their bicycles, kicking the everloving shit out of rival gangs and avoiding being billyclubbed into concussion during the riots. Their characters are established quickly: Ben is nominally the more responsible, Paul competitive and somewhat self-centred, and Frank relies on clowning around to disguise effect his bullying family has on him.

Ben gets married to his childhood sweetheart, but things go south on the big day. Frank borrows money to pay for the reception from a loan shark, confident that his father’s capacity on the card table will cover the debt. A rival gang ambush him on his way to the reception and Frank sustains a severe beating, including a bottle broken over his head, rather than hand the cash over. Although Frank initially lies about the injury, Ben is incensed when he discovers the truth. Ben and Frank stage a revenge attack on the gang leader, inadvertently killing him.

Paul, his thoughts turning to the possibility of earning big money by smuggling, joins Ben and Frank when they flee aboard. Laden with contraband and the name of a contact, they head for Saigon. Turmoil reigns here, too. Their contact, Yeung (Chung Lin), is an underworld lynchpin who is holding torch singer Sally Yen (Yolinda Yam) against her will at his nightclub, strung out on H and forced to prostitute herself. Ben takes against this quite vehemently and, together with the enigmatic Luke (Simon Yam) – a hitman with CIA connections – they dispose of Yeung and abscond with a consignment of gold. Unfortunately, where they abscond to is ever deeper into the war zone and their form of private enterprise doesn’t go over too well with the VC.

For what was obviously a very personal film for Woo, he channels several Hollywood classics. The shadow of ‘Apocalypse Now’ hangs omnipresent; a teeth-grindingly horrible set-piece featuring incarceration in bamboo cages and psychological torture at the hands of the VC is an ode to ‘The Deer Hunter’; and Paul’s interrelated obsession with the gold and increasing inability to function with any degree of honour or humanity recalls Humphrey Bogart’s Fred C Dobbs in ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’.

Ben’s erstwhile calm leadership falters as events become increasingly violent. Paul’s descent into greed and, finally, betrayal begins the moment he gets a gun in his hand. Frank, emotionally the most fragile from the get-go, crumbles under what he endures in the prison camp. What happens during the friends’ escape attempt – during a US counterattack – sets the scene for the final act, which sees Woo back in frenetic, hyper-stylized, epic bloodshed mode a la ‘A Better Tomorrow’ or ‘The Killer’. Matters of honour are settled by protracted car chases and gun battles. Balletic action ignites the screen. Shit blows up with such visual poetry that Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay probably cry themselves to sleep at night knowing it’ll never look as good in one of their movies.

The difference, though – and this is what makes ‘Bullet in the Head’ such a standout in Woo’s Hong Kong filmography (we’ll gracefully avert our eyes as we step past the Hollywood outings) – is that the usual crime/action/shoot ’em up elements play out against the backdrop of a war movie instead of being an aesthetic be-all-and-end-all. Moreover, the war movie aspect makes for a grittier approach to the big action scenes. Where the narrative is Vietnam-based, there are no fluttering doves, guttering candles or gorgeous swathes of bullet-addled slo-mo. In fact, apart from a few judicious uses of freeze-frame, most notably in the first third while Woo is setting up the characters, his distinctive tendency to editing-room showmanship remains unindulged.

Consequently, ‘Bullet in the Head’ lacks the choreographed polish of his work with Chow Yuen-Fat. Although still assembled with more energy and insight into the dynamics of big screen action than most studio tentpole releases, it emerges as a more rough and ready beast by comparison. And this, more than any of its other achievements, does the film its biggest favour.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Killer

Ostensibly, the ingredients of John Woo’s seminal “heroic bloodshed” opus ‘The Killer’ make it sound like a cinematic cocktail (or, more appropriately, a cinematic Molotov cocktail):

Take one existentially iconic hitman a la Jean-Pierre Melville, a dash of Sirkian melodrama (preferably the ‘Magnificent Obsession’ vintage), a double measure of visual imagery from early Scorsese, and a liberal helping of Peckinpahesque slo-mo. Add white doves. Blend.

Which would constitute a pretty accurate and unprecedentedly short (65 word) review, the only addition to which would be a handful of kick-ass screen shots, were it not for the fact that Woo transcends every borrowing, every homage, every lovingly crafted frame of reference and creates something that is stylistically and emotionally his own.

Or, to put it another way, Woo does what very few other directors have ever done with such a degree of success (I can think only of Tarantino offhand): he synthesises his influences so completely that while the end product is beholden on virtually every level – narratively, aesthetically, everything else that ends in “–ly” – to a plethora of other, earlier works, it nonetheless pulls together these diverse strands in a manner that either goes beyond or in a completely different direction to those selfsame influences.

In ‘Le Samourai’, Melville doesn’t have Alain Delon cauterize an exit wound by tamping gunpowder over it and applying a lighted cigarette. In ‘The Wild Bunch’, Peckinpah doesn’t stage the bunch’s climactic shoot-out with Mapache’s army against a backdrop of religious imagery, flickering candles and white doves. And, yes, Melville and Peckinpah don’t make these aesthetic choices for a reason. But Woo does. And that’s kind of the point in and of itself.

The simplest (and least critically valid) summation is that Woo doesn’t certain things – particularly with regard to his use of slow motion, freeze frames and dissolves – because they fucking look cool as fuck. Which they do. And if you can shoot an action scene that’s as balletic, iconic, dynamic and hyper-kinetic as a John Woo action scene, then screw it, you’ve earned the right to do that kind of thing for its own sake and to hell with anything deeper like thematic content, characterisation and moral imperatives.

Woo, however, does things not just because they fucking look cool as fuck but because they contribute to the thematic content of his work, because they define and develop the characterisation, and because he is concerned with the moral imperatives of honour, guilt and redemption. Then, and only then, does the fact that they fucking look cool as fuck come into play.

Let’s revisit that phrase “moral imperative”. Sometimes it’s the directors whose work appears most violent, or attracts the most controversy, who prove themselves as having the more demonstrable morality: it’s true of Sam Peckinpah, true of Michael Haneke, true of John Woo. Haneke’s approach is one of cool, detached cerebralism; his aesthetic rigidly formalist. Woo, like Peckinpah, is a more emotionally involved filmmaker. He is acutely conscious of the way men interact and the codes that bind or divide them. He understands the mindset of the outcast, the criminal, the (conventionally speaking) bad guy. He sees the wounded and compromised humanity in them. Sometimes it’s a defeated sense of humanity; sometimes it’s retrievable.

‘The Killer’ is about a thoughtful and ultra-professional hitman, Ah Jong (Chow Yun Fat) who accidentally blinds nightclub singer Jenny (Sally Yeh) during a hit that turns into a fully-fledged gun battle. During the aftermath, rather than go to ground, he undertakes the proverbial one last job in order to raise money for the cornea transplant that could restore Jenny’s sight, despite the fact that maverick cop Inspector Ying (Danny Lee) is on his trail and unaware that his former paymasters are about to double cross him.

It sounds generic, clichéd and predictable. In Woo’s hands, it’s a dementedly excessive but savagely beautiful and often ludicrously funny work of art.