Word: wooings
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...John Woo's last Hong Kong movie, the action-traction Hard Boiled, was basically Die Hard in a hospital. A zillion bad guys are terrorizing the place, and our indestructible cop hero must mow them down, holding a bazooka- size pistol in one hand -- and a newborn child in the other. No problem. Blam! and a villain's blood splatters a maternity-ward window. Boom! and a few more miscreants eat carpet. Surveying the scene, the cop shields the baby's | eyes and says jauntily, "Hey, X-rated action...
...joke about X-rated action in Hong Kong movies, where the corpses pile up as artistically as in a Pilobolus production number. But Woo might have guessed that when he came to America to make the Jean-Claude Van Damme bayou thriller Hard Target, the gentlefolk on the Motion Picture Association of America's rating board would not be amused. They surely wouldn't think Woo's cult reputation as the world's most gifted director of rapier-edged action films (A Better Tomorrow, The Killer) entitled him to any special dispensation. So they saw Hard Target and sent...
...Hong Kong," says Woo, 48, "the ratings people tell me specific things they want out. But in America they don't tell you what to cut. You're just guessing." Woo had to keep scissoring in the dark, hoping that this triage or that would appease the board. Finally, Hard Target won an R rating with about three minutes lost: a high-impact shot here, a memorable death there. The board might have thought it was protecting teenagers from grim Guignol, but Woo's admirers believe there could be no violence in this film nearly so mindless as the violence...
Hard Target would never have been a masterpiece; it lacks Woo's usual subtlety in dramatizing the brutal brotherhood of cops and creeps. It has a promising premise, a Most Dangerous Game gloss about a gang that arranges manhunts for macho millionaires, but nobody has much of a character. The loner hero (Van Damme), the woman in peril (Yancy Butler), the CEO-type villain (Lance Henriksen) and his soulless henchman (Arnold Vosloo) -- the roles are little more than job descriptions. Martial artist Van Damme gets to punch out a rattlesnake and follow this moral code: I shoot you three times...
...matter. There is personality aplenty in Woo's editing and camera style. ! Here, you feel, is a moviemaker, a popular artist with an infectious joy in his craft. What Raimi calls Woo's "supercharged adrenaline" -- the reckless intelligence he applies to solving the most familiar action scenes -- is evident in each precise, superpotent frame. He could be a cleaner, leaner Sam Peckinpah, or Sergio Leone: the next generation. And in his best work, Woo is a critic and elegist of movie manhood. His Vietnam film, the amazing A Bullet in the Head, is an atrocity picture with a conscience...