Gun Fu and Hong Kong Cinema

John Woo redefined the action film genre with his 1986 Hong Kong film A Better Tomorrow. Staring the Asian TV star Chow Yun Fat and movie star Ti Lung, the film transcended the action genre already well-established in the West by using the various tropes of the genre (gangsters, the conflicted family, brother-against-brother, friend-in-peril, reformed hood, betrayal, and so on), mixing in elements of melodrama and morality (both Buddhism and Christianity appear in the film), and layering it with stylized gun violence -- gunplay like swordplay -- in a manner that had never before been seen. The film played, in certain moments, like a dance -- bullets being used like rain to wash away all the problems and issues that otherwise could not be resolved. For both Chinese and Western audiences, the film was something new: it appealed to both Asian and Western cultural influences and tapped into a universal sense of art and meaning while never really defying the underlying absurdities of the action film genre itself. In other words it gave all action film audiences exactly what they wanted while simultaneously artistically offering the genre in a spruced up but slowed-down and somewhat thoughtful delivery. This paper will show how in A Better Tomorrow Woo both reinforces and undermines the conventions of the action genre by bringing to it a balladic style of violence (gun fu) while maintaining the stereotypical superficialities of the genre; it will also show how this style went on to influence Hong Kong and Western cinema.

Counterfeiting USD is one of the main crimes perpetrated in John Woo's A Better Tomorrow -- a film that melodramatically depicts brothers and friends torn by love, honor, and hatred, past sins and the struggle to forgive. In its basic make-up, the film is a simple tale about friendship and forgiveness -- but in order to entertain and dazzle its audience, Woo counterfeits Western action cinema as well. For example, everything is thrown into the film's egregious finale: the endless stream of bad guys for the heroes to shoot and blow up; the nonsensically contrived showdown in which all the characters are brought together in one place -- a dock -- where reconciliations can take place over a spray of bullets. True to the gun fu form that Woo essentially founded in this film (Shields), nothing brings people together like violence -- and in A Better Tomorrow, the violent shootout improbably fulfills Mark's desire for revenge, Ho's desire for peace, and Kit's desire for justice.

These three characters, who seemed isolated and separated by such strong emotions just ten minutes earlier in the film, have a kind of American memory loss -- that is, everything is forgotten as they get back to basics, forget the things that separated them, and re-bond over bullets. At least that is the best way to characterize Mark's feelings; upon slaying a whole line of bad guys, he stops from the action to force feed a lecture down Kit's throat, fully sentimentalizing the moment that is true to the film's melodramatic core. He is gunned down in the middle of his impassioned speech -- which gives Kit and Ho a chance to bond one-on-one over more bullets, picking up the revenge motif that Mark fumbles in his last minutes on earth. The ways in which Woo's Better Tomorrow weaves revenge, love, forgiveness and violence together like a forged note is really what enables the film to have such strong appeal to both Asian and Western audiences: it passes itself off as both a conventional action flick and an art house film (with scenes inspired by such auteurs as Martin Scorsese) (Murray). The end result is that Woo's film is a stylized work of gun fu that, under scrutiny, comes up short of high art but still manages to be a respectable example of a genre blend.

Indeed, the way it blends kung fu and gunplay is what makes the film stand out. Its impact on Hong Kong cinema has been undeniable as a result. As Jillian Sandell puts it, "if you've ever wished for a violent action film with the style and elegance of an MGM musical, Hong Kong cinema is the place to look." Were it not for Woo's Better Tomorrow, the "contemporary Hong Kong gangster film" genre would never truly have come along -- and, as a result, auteurs like Tarantino would have had far less to build on in their own careers (Sandell). A Better Tomorrow spawned two sequels and a number of knock-offs. Woo himself kept upping the ante with each gun fu film that followed: The Killer, Hard Boiled, and City on Fire all replete with stylized action and sentimentality -- all dripping with blood and morality. That was Woo's contribution to Hong Kong cinema: the taking of the action genre's mindless shoot-'em-ups and blending it with the kung fu genre's insistence on the discipline and morality of its protagonist, while throwing in some melodramatic, sentimental, moralistic tones inspired by Chinese culture's deep religious and philosophical traditions. It made for a fine and elegant slop that only the most visionary of directors, like Woo, could pull off. So many threads to keep together at once is not easily achieved -- and over-indulgence in any one thread line would yield less than stellar results, as Woo's ill-advised Paycheck showed. The glue that could keep them all together, of course, was bullets -- lots and lots of bullets: the one ingredient that any modern action film needed. With Woo's trademark gun fu delivery, the bullets were sure to keep flying -- and, as A Better Tomorrow showed, there was no time like shootout time for characters to come to grips with themselves and finally understand their fellow man.

Additionally, Better Tomorrow's climax is one of the ways that Woo's film, and much of Hong Kong cinema, mimics the West with easy solutions to complex and dramatic problems. Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle, for example, is an homage to Hollywood, with references to Kubrick's Shining, to the noir films of the 20th century, to The Three Stooges and so on. Jackie Chan's films drew inspiration from Buster Keaton, and Woo likewise drew inspiration from Western cinema -- from filmmakers like Hitchcock and Scorsese (Pierce). All of these filmmakers likewise had an impact on the West -- Woo especially, whose Better Tomorrow and its introduction of gun fu into the action genre inspired Western filmmakers from Robert Rodriguez to Oliver Stone to Quentin Tarantino to the Wachowskis ("John Woo's Influence on American Films").

A look at some of the films that were inspired by Woo's gun fu style that first hit the screen in Better Tomorrow include: Robert Rodriguez's Desperado (1995) about a loner guitar player seeking revenge on bad guys in Mexico. The hero of the film, played by Antonio Banderas, uses gun fu (a gun in both hands, arms fully extended, in shootouts where he alone is pitted against a slew of enemies) to accomplish his heroics. Keenan Ivory Wayans imitates Mark Gor directly in A Low Down Dirty Shame when he dons a black trench coat and sunglasses -- a look that the Wachowskis would pilfer for The Matrix as well. In the movies, everyone pilfers from everyone when a trend hits and audiences respond to it -- and that is certainly what happened with Better Tomorrow: Hong Kong audiences made it a box office smash, and Western movie lovers were quick to take note of the John Woo gun fu style that was revamping the action genre. In this manner, the flow between the East and the West was made that much more meaningful as both movie industries -- Western and Hong Kong -- were seen to be watching one another and taking inspiration from what the other was doing. Stone's Natural Born Killers modeled its shootout scenes on Woo's gun fu style. Tarantino took Woo's gun fu and brought it to American audiences in Reservoir Dogs. Even James Bond got in on the gun fu style of action in Tomorrow Never Dies -- the title of which could be read as a direct reference to Woo's very first gun fu film with Chow Yun Fat ("John Woo's Influence on American Films").

Indeed, part of Better Tomorrow's enormous appeal was breakout star Chow Yun Fat's performance as Mark Gor: dynamic, handsome, fearless, cool, and sexy, Mark waltzed and winced, smiled and gritted his teeth across the screen like an Asian Cary Grant kind of gun slinger. Chow Yun Fat exuded the cool confidence that made Americans fall in love with Grant in the first half of the 20th century. What Grant did for American cinema, Yun Fat did for Hong Kong action cinema. His appeal would spread across the Pacific as well: Yun Fat would go on to star in a number of Hollywood films, such as The Replacement Killers, Anna and the King, Bulletproof Monk and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Like Yun Fat, Woo would also go on to have a highly successful career in Hollywood for a time, helming action blockbusters like Hard Target with Jean-Claude Van Damme, Broken Arrow with John Travolta, Face/Off with Nic Cage and John Travolta, Mission Impossible 2 with Tom Cruise, and Windtalkers with Nic Cage ("John Woo: Filmography").

As Abid Rahman points out, Woo attempted to distance himself from the tepid and tiresome kung fu films flooding the market in the 1980s. By stylizing the violence through gun play, Woo brought a new layer of menace and tension to the screen that the years of second-rate kung fu cinema had diminished. Not only is the violence in A Better Tomorrow charged with a loving touch (Mark's stashing of guns in flower pots the way Zorro might stash swords to stay two steps ahead of his foe), it is gleefully displayed in excess just like in American films of the 1980s -- First Blood, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Commando, The Terminator, and others. By introducing what would become known as "gun fu" to Asian cinema, Woo re-invigorated the action film genre but also reinforced the superficiality of cliched and contrived narratives in which a larger good vs. evil paradigm could be showily trotted out in a moralistic manner only to be reduced to a confusing blend of vengeance, self-sacrifice, and respect that never fully makes an effective moral point nor mimics the ambiguity of the best noir films of earlier eras that Woo nonetheless energetically copies in A Better Tomorrow.

To describe A Better Tomorrow as Hong Kong neo-noir would be fitting: it makes effective use of light and shadow to expertly focus the audience's attention, to create dramatic tension, to establish the same kind of haunting imagery that painters of the European Baroque accomplished with chiaroscuro -- Honthorst, Rembrandt, Caravaggio all achieved intensity of mood, tone, style and expression by throwing a concentrated light upon one section of the canvas while shrouding the rest in darkness and shadows. Woo does the same on film, just as the noir filmmakers of the past did to produce the same effect -- from Ford to Houston to Welles. But Woo also draws from other Western filmmakers who are not noir filmmakers -- such as Martin Scorsese. Woo pays "homage" to Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) in the scene where Mark walks in slow motion to take revenge on the thugs linked to Ho's arrest (Murray). The prelude to violence is hypnotic, stylish, and draws the viewer in seductively. The suggestion of pleasure is double-edged: on the one hand, the audience is thrilled at the hint of what is to come -- a violent spectacle -- and on the other hand the director intimates that this type of activity truly is so big that it should not be treated lightly: what Mark is about to do -- gun down an entire mob in a room -- is not something that can be simply shrugged off. Indeed, Mark pays a price for his vengeful bravado: he is crippled by a bullet.

The consequence of his one-man stunt leaves him almost beggarly, reduced from his high-life, high-living status to a bit player in the criminal enterprise three years later. Ho sees him washing the windshield and holding the car door open for men in whose position Mark and Ho used to be. Ho is devastated at the sight of his friend's fall from fortune -- but the fact that Mark was willing to risk such a fall to deliver retribution to those who hurt his friend is an indication of the level of loyalty that Mark owes to Ho. It is this concept of loyalty that Woo attempts to mine throughout the movie as he treads the line between acceptance and rejection, forgiveness and condemnation. The problem is that, given the limitations of the action film and the requirements that audiences seem to place on it, Woo's film falls down in the final act, morally speaking, as all loose ends are neatly tied up so as to provide a "happy" yet "sad" ending that tries but fails to satisfy the myriad demands the film has placed upon itself.

These demands are numerous. First, it signals that revenge is out of the question because it reduces Ho to the level of his enemies -- but Mark is allowed revenge because his character is such that he seems to revel in the violence and his loyalty to Ho covers a multitude of sins. Second, it signals that revenge is, in fact, okay after all -- when Ho kills the man who betrayed him in the final scene. However, the scene could also be interpreted differently, since it is Kit who gives Ho the weapon to kill the villain. Kit looks away as though the action were not really revenge but rather justice. As Kit represents law and order, his sanctioning of the killing could indicate that it is blind justice being delivered at last. At the same time, Ho acknowledges that Kit must also arrest Ho, even if the charges against Ho are baseless (Ho is falsely accused of murdering the villain's father). Ho accepts the punishment that awaits him in a scene that resembles self-sacrifice, which echoes the sacrificial nature of Mark (who dies in an attempt to reconcile Ho and Kit) and the sacrificial nature of the Christian cross that is seen earlier in the film hanging on the wall of Kit and Ho's father -- indeed, over his very bedside. Since it is Kit and Ho's father who pleads on his deathbed to Kit to forgive his brother, the notion of Christian forgiveness linked to sacrifice is evident and becomes another thread that Woo attempts to weave into his tapestry and pull together with the other threads at the end of the film.

Woo is able to effectively unite all the disparate threads woven into the film in the final minutes of the movie, but the overall impression is still that a superficial gloss has been given an otherwise stylistic attempt to overhaul a conventional and stereotypical narrative. Without Woo's introduction of gun fu into the film, the movie would have made far less of an impact on audiences. Indeed, it was Woo's camera combined with Chow Yun Fat's Cary Grant-type of charisma that launched both men into a new direction in their careers. Woo went on to be the master of gun fu, and Yun Fat went on to star in many of Woo's films.

None of this could have been possible without Woo's immersion into Western cinema, however; nor could he have achieved such glowing effect with such conventional material without mining the culture of his own Asian heritage and bringing together the fundamental philosophical ideals that have a universal appeal among both Western and Eastern cultures. Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism (Gong 363) -- which makes up another large part of Chinese culture and heritage -- share some common philosophical tenets -- namely, the ideals of self-renunciation, the respect for family, and the cherishing of friendship. These ideals are all evident in A Better Tomorrow, which is why some critics have described the film as less of an action thriller than an action drama (Murray).

Woo's dramatic sense, however, is consistent with Hong Kong and China's influence on his life and style. As Gerald Mast and Bruce Kawin note, Hong Kong's films come from a unique place -- a place as unique as Hong Kong itself:

Whether they are gritty and gory or sentimental and magical, whether they are gangster stories or fairy tales or martial arts spectaculars, the films defy the limits of space and time and endurance and even gravity in a realm of impossible wonders where dreams turn real, wounds never kill unless they bear a thematic charge, 'perpetual-motion editing' keeps sorcerers and combatants pin-wheeling and sweeping through the air for minutes on end, spells work, honor matters, style and skill are one, and every action and skill is an expression of good or evil. (Mast, Kawin 500).

Hong Kong's own history as a city that grew up under the shadow of England's opium trade bears a significant mark on all those who travel through its place. It has been allowed a certain independence in terms of financing and capital from the Communist mainland of The Republic -- but even that situation is uncertain in the 21st century. Hong Kong's place in the world is unlike any other: it sits between East and West, independent of both, yet having one foot in each. Its citizens are as cosmopolitan as in any other large metropolis -- and its problems are similar as well -- and yet wholly different, too. It is Meaghan Morris who states that Hong Kong cinema "has long addressed local concerns in cosmopolitan cultural forms" (184) -- and Woo taps into this form in A Better Tomorrow, launching it to a higher, artistic ground while still allowing the campy, superficial and stereotypical machismo of the action film genre to have its way with audiences. The local concerns that come up in the film have more to do with the corruption and lawlessness that goes on in Hong Kong because of its special status as an independent city-state in many ways. The cosmopolitan cultural forms are evident in the manner in which the heroes go about their business -- looking every bit as Western as any of the West's heroes. Even the music used by Woo is Western in many cases (a song by Peter Gabriel is used in the score, for example). This all just illustrates that Hong Kong especially has been a recipient of globalization's impact and, as a result, has intertwined both Easter and Western cultures into its fabric.

This perhaps more than any other reason may be why Woo is able to so naturally twine about so many threads in his film. Juggling romance, rivalry, betrayal, morality, revenge, justice, forgiveness and violence is all part of what goes into making A Better Tomorrow a new kind of action film. Such a film could not have come from any other place than Hong Kong, which is situated so uniquely on the world's stage, both receiving and giving cultural ideas in artistic forms.

While Woo has identified as a Christian (Pierce), Better Tomorrow cannot exactly be interpreted as having an overtly Christian message. Instead, its climax leads to a yin-yang type of resolution. Yin-yang is a concept in Chinese philosophy that shows how opposite forces can actually be complementary and interrelated with one another. In the film's final scene, Ho, Kit and the villain Shing are isolated from the police. Shing tells Ho that money and power are enough to ensure that Shing is never prosecuted for his crimes. Kit, the law-abiding son, knows that what Shing says is true. He cannot bring himself to take action, but he does give a gun to Ho, who shoots and kills Shing, thus delivering justice himself, with Kit being an accomplice. Ho then takes Kit's handcuffs and cuffs himself to Kit so that Kit can have his arrest. In this way, Kit and Ho complement one another at last. Having been at odds with one another for most of the film, they finally have fit together. In this sense, the film is very Chinese. Were it interested in delivering a wholly Christian message, the execution of Shing would not have been likely to be depicted.

In fact, the Christian message does not lend itself particularly well to the action genre beloved of Woo and his fans. After all, if Christianity preaches peace, forgiveness and tolerance, it is really at odds with the overall aim of the action film. Gun fu brings with it a particular type of loftiness -- a graceful bravado infused with violent gunplay -- but that cannot offset the contradiction at the heart of the Christian ethos and the gun fu action film orientation. Even when the audience is led to believe that Ho will put down his guns for good and not resort to violence, the film contrives an ending in such a way that Ho will give the action-loving audience the bullet-flying shoot-out that it wants. Ho gets to kill the bad guy who betrayed him and the audience's thirst for revenge is satisfied. However, Woo manages to squeeze in an ounce of Christian thought with Ho's willingness to submit to the authorities and return to prison for sins he did not commit -- namely the execution of Shing's father. In this manner, Woo makes Ho a kind of Christian figure, and in many ways he can be viewed as a kind of prodigal son. Yet how all these contradictory threads fit together in a philosophical sense is one of the more troubling aspects of Better Tomorrow. The main goal of the movie is not to answer all questions, but -- in keeping in line with the noir tradition -- some ambiguity is allowed. The line between good and evil is understood to be gray, blurry, and unclear. Ho and Kit and Mark traverse that line, even as they attempt to understand how it operates within their own hearts.

Still, the contradiction is glossed over by the bullet-riddled climax. Gun fu solves the deeper spiritual and philosophical problems that Woo identifies but cannot adequately address without effecting a completely different type of film -- a film that is not action-oriented at all but rather dramatic. Better Tomorrow is, ultimately, an action film -- a neo-noir thriller that has elements of drama but that finally races towards its conclusion with a bang. The sentimental hokey plot gets everyone where they need to be to help the audience feel satisfied with what they have seen. Mark gets to die heroically (and he is even brought back for the sequel as a new character -- Mark's twin); Kit gets to grow up and become a loving brother again; and Ho gets to settle a score. Gun fu is thus the way to solving life's dilemmas in the Hong Kong gangster film that Wu contemporizes and makes his own. It is not wholly Chinese nor wholly Western. It is a blend -- just like Chow's Kung Fu Hustle would be a blend of East and West cinema twenty years later. Hong Kong' place in the world allowed for that to happen -- and gun fu was the expression of a meeting place between beauty and violence, between the vagaries of life and the higher, loftier perches gotten to by way of religion and philosophy. If swordplay was an ancient art that required discipline to master, gun fu was a new art for a modern warrior. It was a way to achieve resolution when resolution seemed least possible. Better Tomorrow's ending may be sloppy and contrived, but gun fu enables brothers and friends to prove themselves and bad guys to pay a price. Gun fu, for both Eastern and Western audiences, was exactly what audiences at the end of the 20th century wanted: a ballet-like form supplanted on an old and ugly problem; violence is turned into a hypnotic charm that makes one think -- if only in the real world I could solve all my problems thus . . . . Hong Kong's magical and fantastical status -- wedged between the East and the West -- allows for such thinking, and Woo found the cinematic form to communicate effectively this idea. Movie audiences and movie makers in both Asia and America ran with it until eventually the conceit ran out of gas. Today, gun fu has almost become a parody of itself, a hackneyed trope, as audiences exposed to one too many shootouts over the years have tired of the form and found it to become just another cliched way to treat on subjects that deserve more input than bullets can afford. For Woo in Better Tomorrow, they worked sufficiently well -- but only on a superficial level. The style of gun fu never fully eradicates the need for the deeper underlying issues of the film to be addressed.

In conclusion, Woo's gun fu cinema got its start with A Better Tomorrow -- a Hong Kong film that revitalized a genre and spawned something new: the blend of kung fu and action/gangster film genres. The result was a stylish display of violence and grace. The blend inspired movie makers in both China and America to adopt Woo's style and bring the same type of bullet-flying bravado to their own films. At the end of the 20th century, filmmakers and audiences wanted something on the screen that could personify their own desire to do something, to address the ills that affected them. Bullets and ballet seemed, for a time, to be the answer.

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