Hong Kong action movies, and how not to rip them off

t is almost an unwritten law that in print advertisements for film releases, a spot above the movie's title is reserved for the name of a participating bankable actor or prestigious director if not both rendered in a hard-to-miss font size. The poster for Miramax's stateside release of the 1993 Hong Kong action film "Iron Monkey," rolling out next Friday, is something of an anomaly, then. It reserves its most prominent credit not for a big star or seasoned helmer, but rather for Yuen Woo-ping, the fight choreographer behind "The Matrix" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." It happens that Yuen is actually the director of "Iron Monkey," yet the Miramax ad is fascinating in how it credits the choreographer for two productions in which he served a less dominant, although undeniably integral function.

This is a sign of the times, not for its recognition of the tireless contributions of a lower-on-the-industry-caste-system film technician (it's highly doubtful, for example, that we will ever see a studio tout a project as being "from the art director of ŚBig Daddy'"), but for how it symbolizes the current marketability of Hong Kong action cinema in the U.S. Some of the more recent indications of this trend include the astronomical box-office gross of the Jackie Chan vehicle "Rush Hour 2," the use of fight choreographer Xin Xin Xiong as a selling point for "The Musketeer," and Sony's decision to position the Jet Li sci-fier "The One" against Disney's sure-to-be-huge "Monsters, Inc." on Nov. 2.

The interplay between American cinema and other national film movements is too complex and wide in scope to tackle in one column (issues such as the influence of the classical American musical on the Hong Kong action film will not be discussed here), but the current American infatuation with Hong Kong action cinema is an ideal microcosm to examine the dos and don'ts of cinematic appropriation.

In many unfortunate ways, the U.S. reaction to Hong Kong action films has been to scavenge their most rudimentary qualities (i.e. visceral martial-arts battles) and discard their stylistic invention, tonal fluctuations and thematic complexity. The result often becomes a more "hip" distillation of tried-and-true Hollywood formulas. Movies like "Romeo Must Die" and "Kiss of the Dragon" are ultimately not interested in showcasing Jet Li's acrobatics or unique personality; they're too busy hitting all the required crowd-pleasing buttons and molding the star into a stereotypically quiet, subservient, exotic object.

Watching such Hong Kong films as Ching Siu-Tung's "The Heroic Trio," with its colorful comic-book cinematography and bizarre shifts from tragedy to slapstick comedy, or Tsui Hark's "Once Upon a Time in China," with its critique of Westernization, is nothing like watching a standard Hollywood action movie. There is something arrestingly off-kilter about the extremely stylized world of Hong Kong action cinema that seems to elude, or perhaps frighten, most American filmmakers attempting to appropriate it.

However, there is something encouraging about the success of both Yuen-associated projects mentioned above. "The Matrix" demonstrated the beautiful way in which American filmmakers can take a national cinema and preserve what is aesthetically special about it, and yet reinterpret it in a way that is distinctly American. The Wachowski Brothers paid a great homage to Hong Kong filmmakers, capturing the stylish fluidity of the action and the odd narrative and tonal loopiness of their Eastern counterparts. At the same time, they reinvigorated American action cinema by reconfiguring these elements into a narrative that reflects our own national interests, such as technophilia, postmodern dissociation from reality, drug culture and Christian mythology.

"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is not an American-made film, but it allowed director Ang Lee to combine the criticism of societal repression contained in his U.S. projects, such as "The Ice Storm," with the physical grace of Hong Kong action films.

And although Robert Rodriguez's "Desperado" hardly filled up cash registers the way "Matrix" and "Crouching Tiger" did, it represents a similar case study of American cinema's power to reshape the raw material of the Hong Kong action film into an original expression of our own national consciousness. In "Desperado," Antonio Banderas parodies the protagonist of the American western genre, the figure of the quiet yet strong, nameless hero who tames a lawless frontier. Rodriguez embellishes this popular American myth with the action flourishes and self-referential comedy of the Hong Kong tradition.

Making "Desperado" even more of a cinematic melting pot is the decision by Rodriguez, a Mexican-American, to set the story in a crumbling, poverty-stricken Mexican town. Not only can a case like Rodriguez's film enhance the positive, multicultural aspect of American cinema, but it demonstrates that cinema can be a global tool for communication. When our country successfully merges aspects of our own film language with cinematic components from another nation, the implication is that the world can exist with no aesthetic boundaries, that art is something to be shared, something that can have new meanings in new national contexts. Perhaps that's a bit too wordy and treacly for an ad slogan, but acknowledging the contributions of a Hong Kong fight choreographer to our own culture is just as eloquent.

FilmColumnist Brett Buckalew is a junior majoring in cinema-television critical studies.

Copyright 2001 by the Daily Trojan. All rights reserved.
This article was published in Vol. 144, No. 23 (Friday, September 28, 2001), beginning on page 16 and ending on page 15.