Violence as ballet: The enduring influence of ‘Heroic Bloodshed’ on action cinema

Posted On May 13, 2024May 13, 2024

In the 1980s, mainstream action cinema was defined by the bulging biceps and glistening pecs of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and the rest of the musclebound pretenders to the throne. However, on the other side of the world, Hong Kong was ushering in a brand new era with the advent of ‘Heroic Bloodshed’, a reinvention of the action genre that focused on stylised melodrama.

Proving that cinema truly is a cyclical beast, the subgenre’s most noted purveyors – of which John Woo and Ringo Lam were inarguably the leading lights – were initially inspired by the stylistic inclinations of American movies, to which they then applied a distinctly local flavour, which in turn made its way back over to Hollywood where it continues to inspire action flicks to this day.

Although the genesis of the evolution can be traced back to the late 1970s, it was Woo’s A Better Tomorrow that marked a true turning point. In an era where the majority of knowledge the average Western cinemagoer had of Eastern cinema was martial arts, along came a new wave of directors who favoured cool, calm, collected, and charismatic protagonists who dressed well, displayed vulnerability, and were more than capable of diving majestically through the air in slow motion while dual-wielding pistols.

Merging intricately crafted and immaculately executed set pieces with high melodrama and style to spare, it was a breath of fresh air in a time where the majority of the most prominent actioners generally tended to focus on a guy who looked like a kilt sock rammed full of golf balls single-handedly mowing down an army of faceless goons before dropping a well-timed quip.

‘Heroic Bloodshed’ looked far beyond its own genre for influence, though, drawing inspiration from classic westerns, film noir, mystery thrillers, and gangster stories to forge narratives that were rooted deeply in the society from which they emerged but were accessible enough to appeal to viewers all over the world. The heroes and villains tended to operate by a strict moral code, and those shades of grey were a welcome respite from the monochromatic template of having the good guys handily defeat the bad.

These heroes were broken, beaten, scarred, and regularly riddled with bullets, but they’d always pick themselves back up. By the time Bruce Willis scaled the Nakatomi Plaza in Die Hard to help usher in Hollywood’s adoption of the everyman action hero, Hong Kong was already miles ahead of the curve.

Both Woo and Lam ended up making the jump to Tinseltown with decidedly mixed results, but their fingerprints are all over some of the most lauded and lucrative blockbusters of the last 30 years. If it weren’t for A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Hard Boiled, City on Fire, or Full Contact, then the landscape of pyrotechnic escapism would be unrecognisable today.

Quentin Tarantino was so enamoured by the movies emerging from Hong Kong that he dressed like Chow Yun-fat for months, with City on Fire a massive influence on Reservoir Dogs. Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado is ‘Heroic Bloodshed’ with a Mexican twist, Luc Besson named Woo as a touchstone for Léon: The Professional, the underlying homoeroticism of Point Break was ripped right from the playbook, and the Wachowskis were indebted to the operatic nature of its shootouts when crafting The Matrix.

David Leitch and Chad Stahelski have been vocal in citing Hong Kong action cinema as being pivotal to their own work, and between the pair of them, they’ve delivered the John Wick franchise, Atomic Blonde, and Bullet Train, to name but three. It was a case of one hand feeding the other, with ‘Heroic Bloodshed’ ultimately seeping into the pores of how Hollywood changed its approach to action in the 1990s.

The physiques were smaller, the stakes were higher, the characters were more relatable, the visual panache went through the roof, and the slow motion exponentially increased, all of which remains true to this day. If it weren’t for those blazing a trail in Hong Kong more than 30 years ago and churning out classic after classic after classic, though, then Hollywood wouldn’t have sat up and taken notice in the first place.

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