John Woo: The Last Action Hero

By RICHARD CORLISS

John Woo's last Hong Kong movie, the action-traction Hard Boiled, was basically Die Hard in a hospital. A zillion bad guys are terrorizing the place, and our indestructible cop hero must mow them down, holding a bazooka- size pistol in one hand -- and a newborn child in the other. No problem. Blam! and a villain's blood splatters a maternity-ward window. Boom! and a few more miscreants eat carpet. Surveying the scene, the cop shields the baby's | eyes and says jauntily, "Hey, X-rated action!"

You can joke about X-rated action in Hong Kong movies, where the corpses pile up as artistically as in a Pilobolus production number. But Woo might have guessed that when he came to America to make the Jean-Claude Van Damme bayou thriller Hard Target, the gentlefolk on the Motion Picture Association of America's rating board would not be amused. They surely wouldn't think Woo's cult reputation as the world's most gifted director of rapier-edged action films (A Better Tomorrow, The Killer) entitled him to any special dispensation. So they saw Hard Target and sent it back with a prohibitive NC- 17 rating. Seven times. He had been brought to Hollywood to make a John Woo movie, with its ruthless pace, choreographed gunplay and boredom-defying camerabatics -- and after he made it, he found that he couldn't.

"In Hong Kong," says Woo, 48, "the ratings people tell me specific things they want out. But in America they don't tell you what to cut. You're just guessing." Woo had to keep scissoring in the dark, hoping that this triage or that would appease the board. Finally, Hard Target won an R rating with about three minutes lost: a high-impact shot here, a memorable death there. The board might have thought it was protecting teenagers from grim Guignol, but Woo's admirers believe there could be no violence in this film nearly so mindless as the violence done to it. The rating system was preserved, the film's intricate internal rhythm destroyed. "My work is like my child," the mild-mannered director says. "If too many things are cut, it's like cutting my own flesh." Executive producer Sam Raimi, himself an auteur of high-style violence (The Evil Dead), admits he didn't have any good advice for Woo -- "except that one day it would all be over."

Hard Target would never have been a masterpiece; it lacks Woo's usual subtlety in dramatizing the brutal brotherhood of cops and creeps. It has a promising premise, a Most Dangerous Game gloss about a gang that arranges manhunts for macho millionaires, but nobody has much of a character. The loner hero (Van Damme), the woman in peril (Yancy Butler), the CEO-type villain (Lance Henriksen) and his soulless henchman (Arnold Vosloo) -- the roles are little more than job descriptions. Martial artist Van Damme gets to punch out a rattlesnake and follow this moral code: I shoot you three times, then I kick-box your ugly face.

No matter. There is personality aplenty in Woo's editing and camera style. ! Here, you feel, is a moviemaker, a popular artist with an infectious joy in his craft. What Raimi calls Woo's "supercharged adrenaline" -- the reckless intelligence he applies to solving the most familiar action scenes -- is evident in each precise, superpotent frame. He could be a cleaner, leaner Sam Peckinpah, or Sergio Leone: the next generation. And in his best work, Woo is a critic and elegist of movie manhood. His Vietnam film, the amazing A Bullet in the Head, is an atrocity picture with a conscience -- an unflinching Asian view of the politics of testosterone, of the crimes all races of men are capable of committing.

"He lives to make movies," says film critic David Chute, who produced the new laser-disc set of The Killer and observed Woo close up as unit publicist on Hard Target. "He's without ulterior motives, so the set was remarkably free of backbiting, infighting or ego fits." Woo was unfazed by Hard Target's $18.5 million price tag, about five times the size of his Hong Kong budgets. Still, there were adjustments. "In Hong Kong," notes Van Damme, "he's the Steven Spielberg of action movies, but in Los Angeles he's just the new guy in town." Raimi says Woo "had to be told why he couldn't have American stunt men run their faces through candied glass. In Hong Kong they don't have our safety rules, which leads to more stunt men in the hospital -- and to more exciting action sequences."

Last year Woo moved to the San Fernando Valley with his wife and three children. Aside from filmmaking, Chute says, "the only things he's obsessed with are his family and his cooking." Woo may not have much time for Chinese cuisine: he is planning to direct Shadow War, a suspenser about cops and terrorists; and The Killer will be remade, with Richard Gere and Denzel Washington touted to play the assassin and his pursuer. For now, Woo says he is "quite happy with Hard Target." He is one tough guy -- tough enough to survive the M.P.A.A.'s baptism of a thousand cuts.

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles