Few artists have had a bigger impact on modern action cinema than John Woo, whose pioneering Hong Kong masterworks of the late ’80s and early ’90s—A Better Tomorrow, Bullet in the Head, The Killer, Hard Boiled—employed balletic slow motion, two-fisted gunfights, and florid melodrama to push the genre into breathtaking new terrain. He was the grandmaster of sleek, sexy carnage, all of it infused with the beating heart of a romantic. Woo’s subsequent relocation to Hollywood led to further triumphs, led by 1997’s Face/Off and 2000’s Mission: Impossible 2, both of which boast his inimitable aesthetic trademarks and stand as apex examples of his gift for shoot-’em-up stylization. At his professional peak, he was a genuine trailblazer, reimagining familiar cops-and-crooks sagas in exhilaratingly brutal and emotional ways.
Still, America wasn’t a perfect fit for Woo. Despite the aforementioned star-driven hits, more than a few of his films—be it 1996’s nuclear weapon thriller Broken Arrow with John Travolta and Christian Slater, or 2002’s WWII Navajo drama Windtalkers with Nicolas Cage and Adam Beach—underwhelmed with critics and audiences, in part because they lacked his formal and narrative hallmarks.
Increasingly frustrated by a system that wanted to pigeonhole him as merely a maker of slam-bang big-budget affairs, he opted to head back to his native Hong Kong following 2003’s Ben Affleck-headlined Paycheck. There, he spearheaded the historical epics Red Cliff and The Crossing before dipping his toes into familiar waters with Manhunt, a 2017 thriller that reminded international moviegoers that few have ever been better at crafting electrifying and lyrical “gun-fu” showstoppers. It was proof that, even in a 21st-century landscape populated by films inspired by his classics (such as the John Wick and Extraction series), he’s a one-of-a-kind who’s lost none of his distinctive flair.
