A filmmaker like Larry Clark places a viewer in a tough spot. When watching a movie like Kids, Bully, or Wassup Rockers, are we to consider that Clark has perfectly portrayed the aimlessness and idiocy of bored, wayward youngsters in search of a good time? Or is Clark just lazy himself, and he simply hasn’t bothered to fill in any details about his characters, and is solely interested in exploiting them for their nihilistic and decadent tendencies?
That kind of line, where a filmmaker’s attributes are precisely the same as his faults, means that he can be seen as both brilliant or incompetent, and neither is precisely wrong. What does a viewer make of director John Woo, who was a journeyman for more than ten years making kung fu films, slapstick comedy, and low-rent horror films before hitting it big with 1986’s A Better Tomorrow. That film may look quaint and dated as we speak, but at the time it was considered an explosive action thriller, firmly establishing Chow Yun Fat as a charismatic and dangerous anti-hero. Woo’s early motifs, gradual motion gun battles, “cool” motion poses, doves, churches, ridiculous melodrama, a muzak-stage score, minimal development of female characters, the theme of brotherhood, speedy-fire dissolve montages, and direction of the male leads to play their characters as broad and exaggerated as doable, developed from A Better Tomorrow through Hard Boiled, eventually joined him in America for Face/Off, Broken Arrow, Hard Target, and Mission Impossible II. The latter film should have been his last, as every element is so over-the-high and gratuitous, that there was no cause for him to continue making motion pictures, every cliché he helped create is on show, poorly shoehorned in, with an huge budget as a problem-solver.
The one film that Woo put his energy into that was not accepted by the Hong Kong public during his 1986-1992 salad days (by Hard Boiled) was one he considers his favorite, Bullet in the Head. Now Bullet in the Head has all of the issues that make a John Woo film a John Woo film, and whether or not you burst out laughing during the first ½ hour, because the editing appears haphazard and the music corny (is that a saxophone model of “Happy Birthday to You” that’s continuously used throughout the film?), is entirely subjective. Though he would ironically use music in Face/Off, an earth shattering gun battle is juxtaposed with a little one listening to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” Bullet in the Head, even when Woo repeatedly makes use of a poorly covered version of The Monkees’ “I’m a Believer,” never makes it clear that we’re supposed to chortle with the movie. However, by the center section of the movie, as the characters, performed by Jacky Cheung, Tony Leung, and Waise Lee, escape Hong Kong to go to Vietnam to smuggle medicine (in 1967, in the middle of the Vietnam War), the brutal violence can’t really be taken as nudge-nudge humor. Eschewing the glamorous contract killers of his earlier films, Bullet in the Head has its carefree and idealistic characters repeatedly finding themselves in untenable situations, bound to corrupt them. Shooting their method out is a temporary solution which solely digs them in deeper, eventually ensuing in being kidnapped by the Vietcong.
Now Bullet in the Head was originally supposed to be A Better Tomorrow III, a sequence that glamorizes criminals, before Woo had a falling out with producer Tsui Hark. Did the disagreement cause Woo to change his tone and make certain we understood how horrible violence may be? One of the mantras of the characters is, “as long as we have guns, the world is ours,” and writer/producer Patrick Leung stated in interviews that Woo’s intention was to present younger Hong Kong viewers, who had never experienced war in their country, how devastating it might be. [Shades of Kenji Fukasaku’s intention with Battle Royale.]
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