Forget Cruise and Schwarzenegger: Why Chow Yun-Fat is cinema's greatest action hero

The Hong Kong actor made a series of films with director John Woo that revolutionised the action genre – and key to them was his beguiling mixture of toughness and tenderness.

What makes an all-timer action star? Some stand out with their dexterous, daredevil stunts – think Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible franchise. Others' chief selling point is their Herculean physique, as exemplified by the 1980s Hollywood trio of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Jean-Claude Van Damme. But set against these invulnerable, seemingly immortal beings, there's one truly remarkable action performer who has been happy to show that he is all too human – Chow Yun-Fat, the star of some of Hong Kong's most pivotal, internationally influential action films. 

Two of the high-octane films he made with legendary Hong Kong director John Woo, A Better Tomorrow (1986) and Hard Boiled (1992), have been re-released in 4K recently. Now a third, 1989's The Killer, is hitting US cinemas this weekend. In this trio, Chow plays, respectively, a Triad gangster, a principled but hot-headed cop, and a remorseful assassin: what all three performances share is a beguiling mixture of resilience and vulnerability.

Sean Gilman, film critic and creator of website The Chinese Cinema, notes that while Chow has never amazed audiences with "spectacular stunt work like his action star peers Jackie Chan and Jet Li", his versatility as an performer has given him the edge, with his ability to be "as physical as Burt Lancaster, as cool as Alain Delon, as sophisticated as Cary Grant, or as silly as Jerry Lewis (and sometimes all of these and more in the same movie)."

GKIDS films

His greatest work has undoubtedly been in his collaborations with Woo, an action film-making pioneer who "established a hyperkinetic and hyperbolic new style, founded on wild extremes of firepower, body counts, camera angles and cutting patterns", as critic Dave Kehr explained in a 2002 piece on the director. Kehr describes Woo's films as "ballets full of bullets" – "balletic" being the phrase most commonly associated with Woo's style of action. With his emphasis on slow motion as bodies fly across the screen or gunmen gracefully pivot to fire off another round, the director finds beauty amidst the violence. Kehr noted too that it is "hard to cite a major action film in recent years that hasn't incorporated Woo's attitudes and innovations", name-checking Spielberg, Tarantino, The Matrix and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man in the process.

And if Woo helped lay the foundations of modern action cinema, Chow was right alongside him, showing what the ideal action hero for these times looked like, both in Woo's own work and other action classics like Ringo Lam's City on Fire (1987). "He grounds the fanciful action of John Woo and Lam's masterpieces in an everyday reality," Gilman says. "[He's typically a] working-class Hongkonger trying to follow a code and do the right thing in a world of violence and mayhem."

His most influential role

The actor's supporting part in A Better Tomorrow was a breakout for him and established his famous poise and screen presence – just look at him, playing Mark, the confident best friend and Triad brother of Ti Lung's protagonist Sung Tse-ho, lighting a cigarette on a burning note of money. But it was The Killer (1989) that really proved what he was made of. The film follows Ah Jong, a hitman for the Triads, as he becomes disillusioned with his work. His slow mission of repentance begins after he blinds a singer named Jenny during a gunfight. Not long after this accident, we see Ah Jong struggling in pain after having a bullet dug out of his back. Depicting him as so clearly emotionally and physically wounded early on immediately makes the character's trajectory clear: he is too open-hearted for a job where vulnerability is punished, and so is doomed.

You can see traces of Chow's work in The Killer in many films that have followed, particularly ones involving seemingly cold-blooded contract killers finding their soul: you could make a case for Keanu Reeves' John Wick franchise, influential in its own right, as mixing Woo's brand of gunplay with Chow's brand of action-hero cool. 

"He's the emotional centre of these films," Gilman says, "weary and outraged, damaged and yet romantically yearning… but with an endless supply of bullets." At one point Ah Jong's frenemy, cop Li Ying (Danny Lee), observes this yearning within him, noting that his "eyes are very alert… full of compassion, full of passion". Throughout, the audience sees the battle between the character's composure and that compassion, which leads him to reckon with the collateral damage of his work. When Ah Jong sees his handler betray him he seethes, with tears in his eyes. Chow makes this moment seem more painful for Ah Jong than a bullet being dug out of his back.

Alamy

Yet despite this emotional pain, amidst the action scenes' storm of bullets, Ah Jong's physical command is impeccable. Chow moves decisively and with grace – such as when he leaps over a motorbike, then fires a shot to destroy another motorbike while still in mid-air.

While imbuing his tough guy characters with tenderness, Chow also maintained a twinkle in his eye: his playfulness is apparent even in a film as dramatic and tragic as The Killer, especially in the scenes when he's bantering with Li Ying. Elena Lazic, critic and founder of online film magazine Animus, says that the the actor in his 80s and 90s pomp was much "more gregarious and tongue-in-cheek" than his Hollywood peers, even Jean-Claude Van Damme, "[whose persona wasn't] exactly one of steely seriousness either". She adds: "I really enjoy watching Sylvester Stallone in his classic films, to name another action superstar, but it's not always clear that he's actually enjoying himself, the way Chow Yun-Fat really seems to be."

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Hard Boiled, the fifth and thus far final collaboration between Chow and Woo, was another progression from The Killer, giving him a role where he could more readily showcase his deeply-felt humanity as an actor. Chow's cop Tequila is permitted to express his emotions where Ah Jong is supposed to keep them buried. He is relaxed in his style, wearing mix-and-match, loose-fitting jackets and trousers, where Ah Jong is all sharp suits and slicked-back hair. And he is first seen not engaged in violence, but playing the clarinet in a jazz club.

Chow's collaborations with Woo and others are even more striking today than they were back in the 1980s and 90s, because of how action films have evolved – or rather devolved – since. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has popularised an image of the leading action man as an invulnerable, absurdly sculpted being, whose powers are buffed up by digital VFX. In this context, watching Chow's performances is a real tonic: here are men who always feel like real people, despite their superhuman feats and astonishing gunfights, thanks to the internal complexities which Chow projects.

The new 4K restoration of The Killer is screening in US cinemas on 5, 6, and 8 April.

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