Did John Woo Fail in Hollywood?
Face/Off. Image courtesy of Paramount.
John Woo’s legacy in cinema history is already set - his operatic squib city odes to stylized violence established him as one of Hong Kong’s greatest action directors, influencing generations of filmmakers that followed. His success in Hong Kong allowed him to make the jump to Hollywood in the early 90s with Hard Target - a strangely beautiful yet completely insane movie. But Woo didn’t have total control over Hard Target. Due to racism, Paramount kept pretty tight control over the production, including having Sam Raimi supervise him on set.
In his next two American productions, Woo had more control. He also had his American Chow Yun-fat. Unfortunately for Woo, this turned out to be John Travolta. Their first pairing was in the nuclear warhead-heist film Broken Arrow, about which Rotten Tomatoes says: “John Woo adds pyrotechnic glaze to John Travolta's hammy performance, but fans may find Broken Arrow to be a dispiritingly disposable English-language entry for the action auteur.” This will be something of a mantra when it comes to Woo’s Hollywood films - the action is poetry, but in service of hammy acting, bad scripts and disposable plots.
Broken Arrow was, however, a financial success which lead to Face/Off - perhaps Woo’s most delirious experimentation with his singular style in a Hollywood setting. In Face/Off John Travolta and Nicholas Cage famously play each other through the ingenious (?) narrative device of literally swapping faces. This leads to a whole host of questions about the anatomical mechanics of such a swap, but one must bat away such thoughts and realize they have no place in a John Woo movie.
It’s just an excuse for Woo to fully indulge his trademark interest in doubling and foils and how the line separating police from criminals is thin and permeable. With both Cage and Travolta in this film - playing each other, no less - the acting is so over the top that it begins to flirt with performance art. This movie is loud, nonsensical, overwrought, highly stylized madness - it is perhaps the purest version of an American John Woo Hong Kong actioner brought to life. It was also a big financial success. If you can give yourself over to the insanity and let the experience wash over you, I suppose you might call it an enjoyable film.
Building on this momentum, Woo was then given the keys to one of America’s sacred franchises: Mission Impossible. Woo brought his philosophy of action to Mission Impossible 2, with a big budget and a Tom Cruise. The reviews were again familiar: “Your cranium may crave more substance, but your eyes will feast on the amazing action sequences.” Of course it made a lot of money, but it was also nominated for 2 Golden Raspberry Awards and I vividly remember watching it in the theater when I was a teenager and thinking it was fucking stupid.
Woo was carving out a niche in Hollywood as a master of big dumb action - but his films lacked substance, they lacked the qualities that would elevate them beyond genre pulp. And for John Woo this was important. His Hong Kong films have been the subject of huge amounts of critical analysis. They are considered by scholars and movie-goers not just as empty action spectacle, but something much more profound, literate and artistic. I never bought that argument, but it has a lot of currency for a lot of film geeks. I think it is clear from his Hong Kong films that John Woo is a master stylist, but when the action is not the focal point his films are actually pretty bad. And the critical response to his first Hollywood films reinforced that.
In 2002 Woo tried to pivot by helming Windtalkers, a World War II epic about Navajo code talkers. Finally, he had ditched the empty action films about cops and robbers featuring hammy performances and big easy dumb themes coasting on spectacle. This was a Very Serious Movie about the human condition and war and dignity and marginalized people. Woo talked about it as if the film would open a window into life’s mysteries, how “friendship redeems violence.” And here is the critical consensus from Rotten Tomatoes: “The action sequences are expertly staged. Windtalkers, however, sinks under too many clichés and only superficially touches upon the story of the code talkers.”
Woo cannot escape the inertia of his talent as an action director. “Windtalkers simply feels like a mismatch for his trademark style,” wrote one critic. It bombed at the box office, and it didn’t earn any of the critical praise he was looking for. The middling box office and reviews for 2003’s Paycheck starring Ben Afleck put the nail in the coffin. Woo’s style just wasn’t elevating these films. If anything it took an intriguing concept drawn from the work of Phillip K. Dick and made it less interesting with “meaningless chases, shoot-outs, and explosions.” For the last decade or more John Woo has been back in Hong Kong and China turning out films that are both financial and critical successes again.
So does this mean that John Woo was ultimately a failure in Hollywood? Many of his films were financially successful, but he clearly never had the cultural and intellectual impact in Hollywood that he did in Hong Kong in the 1980s. Maybe that is because by the time he got to Hollywood, his style had already been aped by American directors like Quentin Tarantino.
Or maybe it’s simply because John Woo is an impeccable stylist who can control the visual flow of a film like it’s a three dimensional object, but has never given much thought to plotting, character, dialogue and acting. These weaknesses existed and were obvious in his Hong Kong films, but were ignored because of the other stuff he was doing. They were laid bare when he started making Hollywood films and this ultimately prevented John Woo from having the kind of deep and lasting impact in the United States that he was probably hoping for.
