“I’ve done so much where everything is big. “This is what I really wanted to do,” Woo tells the Guardian during a promo stop in Los Angeles. He wears it well on an anomalous film that nonetheless re-establishes his powers as a peerless composer of action. For a maverick synonymous with adrenaline-drunk zeal, his last remaining act of subversion demanded the one thing he hadn’t yet tried: restraint. Where the Woo of old would have seized an opportunity for his favored formal pyrotechnics, he instead challenged himself to puncture his own aesthetic, and deflate his signature histrionics until all that’s left is a diamond-hard core.Īs a result, he’s turned in one of his leanest and meanest works, a shoot-’em-up with a more grounded brutality unexpected from a 77-year-old legend still capable of surprising his devotees. ![]() The set-up sounds like another bullet ballet right in the master’s wheelhouse, a Death Wish riff in which a bereaved husband (Joel Kinnaman) opens up several successive cans of whup-ass on the no-goodniks responsible for killing his son. Even as budgets shrank and expanded, everything had to be larger than life – the emotions and the explosions.īut that’s not the case in the surprisingly pared-down Silent Night, Woo’s first English-language film in 20 years. ![]() Blazing a path to Hollywood, where his critical regard and box-office grosses slipped after a few early successes, he remained staunchly committed to maximalism in mood and content. Admirers also described the movement he spearheaded as a cinema of “heroic bloodshed”, its wanton violence paired with a classical notion of honor and villainy not so far from melodrama. ![]() In Hong Kong’s booming pre-handover industry, Woo spent the 80s and early 90s cranking out works of operatic, hyperkinetic intensity termed “gun fu” for their ballistic fusion of martial arts with the gangster picture.
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