The action cinema of John Wick, Havoc and John Woo’s The Killer has constantly evolved as it’s travelled between filmmakers and eras.
Now on Netflix, writer-director Gareth Evans’ Havoc is an ultra-violent stew of influences. It’s set in a benighted US city, but was shot in Wales; its bullet-strewn action is directly inspired by Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo.
Then again, action cinema has always been a particularly international genre, taking in disparate bits of American westerns, low-key French thrillers and more besides. When John Woo directed A Better Tomorrow, released in 1986, its contemporary gangland setting and ferocious shoot-outs changed the look and feel of action cinema forever. Widely credited with inventing what was later dubbed the ‘heroic bloodshed’ genre, it made a star out of its lead, Chow Yun-fat.
Woo continued to hone his signature style – slow-motion photography, close-quarters action, and his characters’ habit of holding a pistol in each fist – into the 1990s. A Better Tomorrow II (1987), The Killer (1989) and Hard Boiled (1992) each built on the ambition and technical skill of the last, and it wasn’t long before Woo was tempted over to Hollywood, beginning with Hard Target in 1993.
Heroic bloodshed didn’t emerge in a vacuum, however. Already a veteran director of some 60 years by the time he directed A Better Tomorrow, Woo drew on a wealth of influences for his genre-shifting thriller. The intricate choreography of his earlier martial arts films was fused with the aggressive style of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) – a western Woo later named as his favourite action movie of all time.
Woo’s heroic bloodshed movies were also heavily influenced by European cinema – especially the French New Wave. Director Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 film, Le Samouraï, was a particularly important touchstone.
Like The Killer, Le Samouraï is about a hitman whose latest job – an assassination in a nightclub – is witnessed by a musician. Woo also clearly styled Chow Yun-fat’s anti-hero after Alain Delon’s Jef Costello, both in terms of his sharp dress sense and his lone wolf persona.
In a 1996 essay written for Cahiers du cinéma, Woo professed his love for Le Samouraï and Melville’s filmmaking in particular. Like Chow Yun-fat’s melancholy assassin Ah Jong, Melville’s protagonists are “loners, doomed tragic figures, lost on their inner journey.”
Read more: Havoc review | Netflix’s most violent thriller ever? Quite possibly
Melville’s work was so striking to him, Woo wrote, because it was such a fusion of styles and cultures. His best-known movies – also including Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966) and Le Cercle Rouge (1970) – drew on the trappings of American noir fiction, but shifted their events to modern-day France and threw in a hint of existentialism and even eastern philosophy for good measure.
“Melville often used Eastern proverbs in the opening titles of his films,” Woo wrote. “He understood Chinese philosophy even more than our own people. I think that I relate to his movies because his vision of humanity is so rooted in the Eastern tradition. His characters are not heroes; they are human beings. In the gang world, they have to stick to the rules, but they remain faithful to a code of honor that is reminiscent of ancient chivalry.”
Woo’s affection for Melville was such that he “tried to imitate” the director from his earliest martial arts films. It was when he decided to make a contemporary gangster movie with A Better Tomorrow, however, that he looked again at the French director’s style:
“I based Chow Yun-fat’s performance, his style, his look, even the way he walked, on Delon in Le Samouraï. In Hong Kong, you never saw people wearing raincoats, so it was a surprise to see Chow Yun-fat in this kind of outfit. It was all part of the Melville allusions throughout the film.”
Woo’s films were such immediate hits that cinema was never quite the same afterwards. In Hong Kong, other filmmakers quickly snatched up the heroic bloodshed baton, and through the 80s and 90s, the period settings and swords of martial arts movies were replaced by gangsters and hails of bullets.
Elsewhere in the world, other directors were taking note. Robert Rodriguez brought heroic bloodshed to Mexico for his blistering debut, El Mariachi (1992). Quentin Tarantino drew on the black suits, twin pistols and Mexican standoffs of modern Hong Kong cinema for his directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs (1992) – a film loosely modelled on Ringo Lam’s City On Fire (1987). In France, Luc Besson channeled a bit of Woo’s spirit in Leon (1994).
By the end of the 1990s, Woo’s name and style was recognised far beyond the genre fans who’d championed his earlier action movies. The likes of Mission: Impossible 2 and Face/Off brought his unique style to western multiplexes. At the same time, the Wachowskis’ sci-fi action film The Matrix pulled the iconography of Hong Kong cinema – and anime, and so on – further into the mainstream.
In the 21st century, action cinema continues to evolve, both in step with changing audience tastes and technological advances. The John Wick franchise owes a clear debt to John Woo, though filmmakers David Leitch and Chad Stahelski also merged that influence with their own particular taste in lighting and stunts.
Over in Wales, Gareth Evans spent much of 2021 making his own homage to Woo’s operatic action for this year’s Havoc. Although Tom Hardy’s grizzled cop, Walker, lacks the sharp style of Chow Yun-fat or Alain Delon, he’s a similarly lonely figure – and equally adept at firing guns at point-blank range.
“This film for me is a love letter to all the Hong Kong, heroic bloodshed films that I grew up watching,” Evans told us earlier this year. “There’s been a whole heap of influences not just from John Woo, but [director] Ringo Lam as well, and Peckinpah.”
Woo’s impact on Evans is such that even small details – like the particular sound of a gun running out of ammo – have lodged in his brain.
“There’s a scene in The Killer in the church… [actor] Danny Lee falls to the ground and he’s emptying an AK-47 into this one random thug who just gets riddled with bullets. He fires and empties the clip. But when he empties the clip, it does this interesting [clicking] sound. I’ve always been obsessed with that sound.”
So obsessed, versions of it have made their way into Evans’ hit TV series Gangs Of London, and now Havoc.
For one final example of how powerfully the work of one filmmaker can impact another artist’s way of thinking, it’s worth looking at a couple of anecdotes about fashion.
In his Cahiers essay, John Woo recalls that Le Samouraï had such an impression on him that it changed the way he and his friends dressed almost overnight. “I was almost a hippie, wearing long hair…Right after I saw Le Samouraï, I decided to cut my hair like Delon and started wearing white shirts and black ties.”
About 20 years later, a young Quentin Tarantino saw some John Woo movies in the cinema and was similarly inspired.
“I was really taken with Chow Yun-fat at that time, I thought he was one of the cooler actors to come out in movies,” Tarantino told Far Out Magazine last year. “He kind of had this Chinese Alain Delon quality. When I saw [The Killer and A Better Tomorrow II], I got a big long coat like him, I got a pair of glasses like him and walked around for like three months dressing exactly like Chow Yun-fat.”
Action cinema is therefore about far more than slow-motion dives and muzzle flashes. It’s an ongoing conversation between filmmakers, crossing generations and continents – and spanning the course of decades.
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