A stunt choreographer tries to recapture his 80s and 90s youth in a movie that pays tribute to Hong Kong action cinema. Our Stuntman review:
Exploring similar territory to this summer’s The Fall Guy, but made with less noisy bombast, Stuntman is a heartfelt ode to the golden age of Hong Kong action cinema. It opens with what looks strikingly like the climactic set-piece in Jackie Chan’s 1985 masterpiece, Police Story – a bruising fight in a shopping mall, with hoodlums being side-kicked down escalators and sent crashing into glass display cases. This, we later learn, is the set of mid-90s martial arts crime movie Operation Vulture, on which Sam (Stephen Tung) was at the height of his powers as a stunt choreographer.
During the making of that film, however, a high-wire stunt involving a leap from a bridge and a moving truck went catastrophically wrong, almost fatally injuring a stunt performer and effectively ending Sam’s career. Decades later, Sam’s now an osteopath and part-time security guard; meanwhile, the Hong Kong film industry has dwindled, with its 80s and 90s peak far behind it.
Then an old colleague, tasked with making one more martial arts film before he retires, coaxes Sam into joining him on his swansong – the hope being to re-capture the energy and danger of the movies they were making at such a prodigious rate when they were still young men.
Back on set and choreographing his first fight scene in 30 years, Sam quickly snaps back into his old way of making movies – barking orders, demanding multiple takes, and displaying a worrying lack of concern for his colleagues’ safety. As Sam soon discovers, however, the world’s moved on from the 1980s, when he could spend 20 days perfecting a single fight scene; “Now we spend 20 days shooting a movie,” a producer sternly tells him when she realises that the veteran’s already behind schedule on his first day of production.
Directed by Albert and Herbert Leung (themselves former stunt performers), Stuntman is about a particular style of action cinema, but unlike The Fall Guy, it isn’t itself an action film. Rather, it’s a drama – sometimes sentimental, but also often genuinely moving – about the passions that make people risk their well-being and personal relationships to make movies.
Sam’s reckoning with his past mistakes – the stuntman he injured in his last film; his strained relationship with his now adult daughter, Cherry (Cecilia Choi) are the focal point. But Stuntman is also about the younger generation of filmmakers around Sam: wannabe performer Lee (Terrance Lau), torn between the security of a nine-to-five job in his brother’s delivery business on one hand and the lustre of the movies on the other. Then there’s action film star Leung Chi Wai (Philip Ng), who’d previously worked with Sam as a youth and is wary of returning to his dangerous, anything-to-get-the-shot approach to stunts. (The latter’s a particularly canny piece of casting, given that one of Ng’s earliest movies was New Police Story; like Leung, he’s old enough to have experienced the last glimmer of Hong Kong action cinema’s pomp.)
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It’s a likeable group of characters, and all are acted superbly. Stephen Tung’s soulful performance, in particular, with the years of disillusionment and guilt etched on his face, does much to make Sam – even at the height of his ugly perfectionism and megalomania – a beguiling protagonist. That Tung is a real-life veteran of action films – he made his debut as an actor in Enter The Dragon before serving as an action choreographer on the likes of A Better Tomorrow, Hard Boiled and The Blade – undoubtedly adds to the emotional content he shows here. He’s actually lived through this stuff.
Through Sam, screenwriters Anastasia Tsang and Oliver Yip weave a story that balances a nostalgic yearning for Hong Kong’s best years in filmmaking – years that gave us Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Samo Hung, Tsui Hark, John Woo and too many others to list – with the sober acknowledgement that the films of that period often came at a personal cost to those who made them.
There are flaws here and there: a violent scene shot on city streets without permits would surely have attracted the attention of more than two cops on patrol, and Stuntman occasionally slips into soapy melodrama, but it’s more than held together by its performances and the sincerity of its filmmaking. It even ends with a blooper reel of the sort Jackie Chan added to his movies after he made The Cannonball Run. It’s surely enough to make devotees of Hong Kong’s 70s, 80s and 90s output want to rush to their DVD shelves and revisit the classics.
If there’s any justice, Stuntman will also encourage a younger generation of viewers to discover those movies for themselves.
Stuntman is out in UK cinemas on the 11th October.
