Hong Kong action cinema: Encyclopedia II - Hong Kong action cinema - Reinventing Action Cinema

Hong Kong action cinema - Reinventing Action Cinema

Chan's clowning may have helped extend the life of the kung fu wave. For all that, he had become a star towards the end of the boom, and would soon help move the colony towards a new type of action. In the 1980s, he and many colleagues would forge a slicker, more spectacular Hong Kong pop cinema that would successfully compete with the post-Star Wars summer blockbusters from America.

Hong Kong action cinema - Jackie Chan and the modern kung fu film

By 1983, Chan branched out into action films which, though they still used martial arts, were less limited in scope, setting and plot. His first film in this vein, Project A, saw the official formation of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team and added elaborate, dangerous stunts to the fights and typical slapstick humor (at one point, Chan falls from the top of a clock tower through a series of fabric canopies). The new formula grossed over HK$19 million.

Chan continued to take the approach - and the budgets - to new heights in hits like Police Story (1986). Here was Chan dangling from a speeding bus, sliding down a pole covered with exploding light bulbs, and destroying large parts of a shopping centre and a hillside shantytown. The '88 sequel called for explosions on a scale similar to many Hollywood movies and seriously injured leading lady Maggie Cheung - an occupational risk Chan had already grown used to. Thus Jackie Chan created the template for the contemporary urban action-comedy of the '80s, combining cops, kung fu and all the bodybreaking potential of the modern city with its glass, metal and speeding vehicles.

Hong Kong action cinema - Tsui Hark and Cinema City

Chan's move towards larger-scale action films was parallelled by work coming out of Cinema City, the production company established in 1980 by comedians Raymond Wong, Karl Maka and Dean Shek. With movies like the spy spoof Aces Go Places (1982) and its sequels, Cinema City helped make modern special effects, James Bond-type gadgets and big vehicular stunts part of the industry vernacular (Bordwell 2000).

Director/producer Tsui Hark had a hand in shaping the Cinema City style while employed there from 1981-1983 (Teo, 1997) but went on to make an even bigger impact after leaving. In such movies as Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) and A Chinese Ghost Story (1987, directed by Ching Siu-tung), he kept pushing back the boundaries of Hong Kong special effects. He led the way in replacing the rough and ready camera style of '70s kung fu with glossier and more sophisticated visuals and ever more furious editing.

Hong Kong action cinema - John Woo and the gangster film

As a producer, Tsui facilitated the creation of John Woo's epoch-making heroic bloodshed movie A Better Tomorrow (1986). Woo's gangster saga combined fancifully choreographed (and extremely violent) gunplay with heightened emotional melodrama and broke another all-time box office record. It also jump-started the faltering career of co-star Chow Yun-Fat, who overnight became one of the colony's most popular idols and Woo's favorite leading man. (Logan, 1995)

For the remainder of the '80s and into the early '90s, a deluge of films by Woo and others explored similar territory, often with a similar visual style and usually with a particularly Chinese emphasis on the fraternal bonds of duty and affection among the criminal protagonists. The most notable other auteur of these themes was Ringo Lam, who offered a less romanticized take in such films as City on Fire, Prison on Fire (both 1987), and Full Contact (1992), all starring Chow Yun-Fat. These filmmakers were accused in some quarters of cravenly glorifying Triads, or Chinese organized crime figures, whose involvement in the film business was notorious (Dannen, Long, 1997).

Hong Kong action cinema - The wire fu wave

As the gangster film petered out in the early '90s, period martial arts returned as the favored action genre. But this was a new martial arts cinema that took full advantage of technical strides as well the higher budgets that came with Hong Kong's dominance of the region's screens. These lavish productions were often adapted from the more fantastical wuxia novels, which featured flying warriors in mid-air combat. Performers were trussed up on ultrathin wires to allow them to conduct gravity-defying action sequences, a technique known, sometimes disparagingly, as wire fu.

As so often, Tsui Hark led the way with The Swordsman (1990), from the works of Jin Yong, and Once Upon a Time in China (1991), which resurrected oft-filmed hero Wong Fei Hung. Sequels and a raft of imitations followed, often with Mainland martial arts champion Jet Li, who had become the biggest new superstar with his portrayal of Wong. The other signature star of the subgenre was Taiwanese-born actress Brigitte Lin. She made an unlikely specialty of androgynous woman-warrior types, epitomized by her villainous, sex-changing eunuch in The Swordsman 2 (1992).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Reinventing Action Cinema", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki