The hallmarks of John Woo’s style are as well-known as the film-maker’s own name: tough customers with blacked-out sunglasses and never-ending chains of cigarettes, flying through the air with dual-wielded pistols blazing, doves a-flutter in the background.
In Hong Kong’s booming pre-handover industry, Woo spent the 80s and early 90s cranking out works of operatic, hyperkinetic intensity termed “gun fu” for their ballistic fusion of martial arts with the gangster picture. Admirers also described the movement he spearheaded as a cinema of “heroic bloodshed”, its wanton violence paired with a classical notion of honor and villainy not so far from melodrama. Blazing a path to Hollywood, where his critical regard and box-office grosses slipped after a few early successes, he remained staunchly committed to maximalism in mood and content. Even as budgets shrank and expanded, everything had to be larger than life – the emotions and the explosions.
