I have given this man several chances.
The one movie where he almost convinced me he had talent was The Killer, and that was only after I forced myself to stop taking it seriously and watch it as a comedy. It went from pretty unbearable to quite enjoyable.
The problem is that that’s the only one of his films that I’ve been able to do it with.
Hard Boiled? It almost worked the way it wanted to.
Mission Impossible II? I wanted to vomit.
Face/Off? I almost fell asleep.
Broken Arrow? I was confused at the inanity.
Windtalkers? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!…oh wait…that was a drama…oh…
Okay, so people will tell me that I’ve obviously heavily dosed on his American stuff which, apparently, gets cut down a lot. Fine. You know what else was cut down a lot? The Magnificent Ambersons, and that movie was still good.
John Woo is a hack.He manages to create some cogent action sequences that can border on the insane, and that would be awesome, if the rest of the movies were made in the same way. Instead, all of them treat themselves deathly seriously, except that Woo can’t seem to get anything approaching a decent performance from anyone outside of Chow Yun-Fat, who seems to want to make comedies instead of what Woo makes. There’s always a little twinkle in his eye. Maybe he was the only one who really understood what Woo’s subconscious was trying to accomplish, something that Woo’s ego had no idea of.
I first had this thought about a year ago after watching The Killer when I imagined what the memorial reel would be once Woo passed from his mortal coil. I realized that there wouldn’t be a second of footage from a scene that did not involve flying guns/people/people and guns/doves/debris. Why does Woo get many passes from the geek community when people like Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay (fan of the latter, but not so much of the former) get eviscerated by certain segments whenever one of their movies is released because of the lack of decent story or character?
I’m dying to see a huge fan of Woo explain to me why Hard Boiled is a great film while The Day After Tomorrow is junk.
