I think the simplest solution to making better action movies would probably be to just have John Woo direct them all.
John Woo may not actually be the be all and end all of action movies, but… you’ve got to concede that the fellow has chops.
John Woo revitalized Hong Kong action cinema, and when the U.S. got wind of what he was up to, he inadvertently revitalized American action cinema as well. And by way of appreciation, America repaid John Woo by nearly destroying his career, which is hard to admit considering how much I love ‘Broken Arrow’.
The point is, many have tried to capture the magic of what John Woo does, but very few have been able to duplicate his magic.
Now, given that buildup, there’s really only two ways the rest of this review can shake out: either I’ve found one of the rare gems to play on John Woo’s level; or I’ve found another pretender to the throne.
(Spoiler alert, it’s the second one.)
I hope that by this point in our online relationship, gentle reader, you know me well enough to know that if a movie is titled “Blood Stained Tradewinds”, I am absolutely going to watch the shit out of that movie. And that, as unbiased as I try to be, with a name like that, you pretty much start at an ‘A+’ and have to work your way down from there.
The message being: “Hey. I’m on your side, movie with the best title ever…”
Blood Stained Tradewinds is a film very much in the John Woo mold, but interestingly enough (and this is perhaps the primary fault of the film) not in terms of the action. Rather, it apes the gangster codes of honor style melodrama of A Better Tomorrow, and marries it to some surprisingly bland action beats.
The movies begins with a childhood flashback that lays out the themes of the movie in a hilariously on-the-nose manner. In less than two minutes of screentime, our old pal subtext has been wrestled to the ground and put out of its misery.
With warning shots thusly fired, we move into the present day (or, more accurately, the early 90’s) to follow the misadventures of the Zhang Yu gang, led by Zhou Long. Long longs (sorry) to step down, and has appointed Cheng to succeed him. But for reasons never entirely made clear, Cheng declines in what can only be described as the most hysterically undignified manner imaginable. I have to give credit to the actor who plays Cheng for being so willing to look so pathetic, but it doesn’t exactly do wonders for our heroes image.
With Cheng excommunicated from the gang, his best friend Xiong takes the gig, and if you don’t think the fact that Xiong was originally passed over by his father figure and only got the job as sloppy seconds isn’t going to come back to haunt everyone, I certainly hope you enjoy this, because obviously it’s the first movie you’ve ever seen.
Cheng goes into semi-exile, where he befriends a hooker named Fang, her son, and her pimp Chao, who is also her brother.
Chao, if you hadn’t guessed, is not a great dude.
While Cheng tries to build himself a new life, Xiong goes about his business of running the Zhang Yu into the ground. Their rivals in the Yakuza are nipping at their heels, and everyone on his team keeps going on about how much better Cheng would be as leader, which Xiong takes slightly better than you’d expect…
There’s a lot that Blood Stained Tradewinds does wrong, but there’s some things it does right, as well. Chief among them is how twisty the plot gets in its second half. While you can probably guess how this all has to end, the path to get there is surprisingly clever and unexpected. At certain points, it seems like they’re intentionally playing up the clichés to throw you off your guard. I like being surprised by an action movie, and there were a few pleasant ones here.
(At the risk of giving away SPOILERS, I have to say that the ending, which goes all Hamlet on us, is one for the ages…)
But in the end, it wasn’t enough to make up for the corny melodrama, and the mostly forgettable action.
It’s pretty obvious that director Yuen Chor is playing in the John Woo sandbox, with questions of brotherhood, and loyalty, and family, and duty… and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But where Woo commits fully to the overheated emotionality of it all, risking (and occasionally achieving) utter ridiculousness, Chor stages his drama with a distinct lack of energy and style, making everything come off like a particularly leaden soap opera.
Take Fang’s monologue where she details how she wound up being a hooker. The words she says are cliché and boilerplate (or at least that’s what the subtitles lead me to believe), but that doesn’t really matter in a movie like this. All you have to do is just sell it good and proper and you’re way ahead of the game.
But the lifeless line readings and the static camerawork turn what could at least be enjoyable campy into a witless slog.
The only dramatic scene that works in that over-the-top way is the scene where Sophia confronts Xiong…
…Oh, I haven’t even gotten to Sophia, who is quite simply the worst. Sophia is Xiong’s wife. Cheng, Xiong, and Sophia grew up together, and it’s clear that Cheng and Sophia had eyes for one another. But when Cheng gets exiled from the gang, he takes it upon himself to trash his rep in Sophia’s eyes, so she won’t feel bad about his leaving. She goes on to rebound with Xiong, and when she finds out about Cheng’s deception, she brings it up to her husband literally moments after he complains to her about how nobody respects him. She seems to think it’s an amusing story, as opposed to a soul-crushing confirmation of his worst insecurities.
I don’t know much about relationships, but I do know this: even if you do it in an anecdotal way, it’s ill-advised to confirm your husbands suspicions that he’s the door prize, especially when he’s a violent gangster-type.
Sophia is an entertaining character, inasmuch as she’s written in a way where she never does anything that doesn’t make things just a little bit worse for the men in her life. The love quadrangle they seem to be shooting for doesn’t play because it’s hard to imagine why Cheng would choose the flighty, hapless Sophia over the far more charismatic persona of Fang (even if she botches her big monologue).
But to be fair, women tend not to get a fair shake in movies like this anyway (and with the exception of Joan Allen in Face/Off, John Woo doesn’t have all that great a track record, either). It’s all about the bros, and all the men in the movie give pretty great performances. Chao is awesomely scummy; Xiong’s second-in-command Wei smugly undermines his boss with style and grace; Xiong himself makes his neurotic, conflicted character play well enough that you’re genuinely unsure of which way he’s going to turn; and Cheng commits fully to all the conflicting aspects of his character, from badass to naïve white knight manchild to embarrassingly weepy promotion-rejecter.
(I will take points away forever, for having a character named Uncle Do, and then another, completely different character named Uncle D… that’s just plain lazy, guys.)
At the end of the day, any flaws in the movie would be easily forgiven if the action was up to snuff, and unfortunately, that just isn’t the case here.
The action here isn’t bad, by any stretch of the imagination. No, the problem is that it’s just not up to the admittedly high standard I’ve come to expect from Hong Kong cinema. In a weird way, it’s too American.
See, I have this theory about the differences between action movies in America and action movies in Hong Kong, particularly around this time, and it basically boils down to people fall down better in Hong Kong.
In an action movie, people who get shot fall down. This is probably true of people in real life as well, as long as they’re not on bath salts. But to paraphrase the West Wing, “When the fall is all that’s left, it matters a great deal.”
In Hong Kong, they don’t just drop like a sack of flour. They twist, they bend, they flip, they knock shit over…there’s a certain dynamism to it all.
In America, especially in the eighties and early nineties, you get shot, and you fall down. Simple as that. Wave after wave of people, interchangeable, just getting hit and collapsing in a heap. They’re no longer foes vanquished; they’re not much better than walking training dummies, and the cumulative effect is that the violence feels weightless instead of cathartic.
Blood Stained Tradewinds absolutely lives up to its name, but there’s no style to it all. It’s just armies being mowed down. There’s nothing memorable or iconic about any of the action, and that’s a real shame.
But I don’t want to get too down on the movie. The action may not be great, but it’s fairly plentiful, so it’s not like you’re going to get bored. And like I said, the twists in the second half are surprisingly effective, and the ending is pretty damn entertaining. So in the end, it’s a passable experience, made that much worse because it wastes one of the greatest titles in the history of cinema.
(For the record, the title is explained at the end of the film, in a monologue that makes no sense whatsoever. It is glorious…)
