CINEMA: Buddy Bradley
QUO VADIS the action movie? Who among us has not posed this fundamental question on returning, sick at heart, from the local cineplex after enduring yet another actioner which seemed promising … but then totally sucked?
This year’s roll of dishonour is already a long one, including stinkers like Beverly Hills Cop III, and ho-hum, why-did-they-bother? films like the remake of Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway.
Fortunately, two recent movies provide some response to the question. The first, Speed, started last week, and will run and run until surely viewed by every sentient (and perhaps non-sentient) South African above the age of 16. The other, Bullet in the Head, came and went in a week, certainly underpublicised but nonetheless sadly ignored by the Jo’burg “arthouse”/hipster audience, whose collective appetite for Merchant-Ivory-style kitsch masquerading as profundity is only paralleled by its unadventurousness and lack of commitment to real movies.
Fortuitously for this crowd, Speed is the real thing, and a marvellous movie. The simple but ingenious mad bomber versus LAPD Swat team cop bomb-on-the-bus plot propels nearly two hours of pure pleasure. The movie’s virtues are many. Dennis Hopper is at his cackling, maniacal best as the bomber. It’s typecasting, but nobody does it better — and it plays off perfectly against Keanu Reeves’ pumped-up and stolid (but not blank) Gen X cop. Spunky, but thankfully not perky, Sandra Bullock is immensely appealing as the woman in peril — an action movie staple — who rises to the occasion.
The stunts are spectacular and the production design fabulous: from the neo-Deco titles onwards, Speed seems burnished, all gleaming chromed surfaces in which we get to see the reflections of bombs exploding — in orange and gold fireballs against the blue Los Angeles sky. One couldn’t ask for more.
The “Die Hard on a bus” analogy for Speed now being traded on by the movie’s publicists shouldn’t obscure some interesting differences between it and the run of the mill big-budget actioners audiences have become used to of late. For one, Reeves’ Jack Traven is smart, no muscle-bound himbo — but, equally, not your typical, wisecracking smartass.
Then, despite all the setpieces and explosions, Speed is a lean production, relatively uncluttered and plot-driven, not bloated, ironic and silly like The Last Action Hero or the egregious True Lies. And finally, in line with director Jan de Bont’s intention to make “a kinder and gentler” action movie, the body count is far lower than usual (probably under 10, as compared to Die Hard II’s 264 — yes, someone counted) and every death at least registers.
A different, altogether more violent and poetic route has been taken in Hong Kong director John Woo’s movies, of which Bullet in the Head is his personal favourite. Woo made several standard Hong Kong low-budget martial arts movies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But from 1986’s A Better Tomorrow (shown earlier this year in Hillbrow for a few weeks) and through 1989’s astonishing, breakaway hit The Killer (released here on video as a martial arts movie; you can find it if you search), 1990’s Bullet, and 1992’s Hard-Boiled, Woo’s career took off.
He is now regarded as the world’s foremost action auteur and, championed by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola among others, got his Hollywood shot with last year’s Hard Target (now available on video). Starring Jean-Claude van Damme (and with a great bad-guy performance by our own Arnold Vosloo, dik South African accent and all), Target was fun.
But the epic Bullet in the Head indicates better what the fuss is all about. It’s a buddy movie set in Southeast Asia in the late 1960s. Three friends, forced to leave their home in Hong Kong because of a rather unfortunate — but justified — murder committed by one of them, go to Vietnam to seek their fortune, become embroiled in war and crime, and fall out. The movie is intense, melodramatic, febrile, operatic, crazy.
Nobody since Peckinpah has directed action better than Woo. Indeed, Woo shares several of Peckinpah’s thematic concerns — notably the nature of honour and obligation — and Bullet bears some resemblance to Peckinpah’s masterpiece, The Wild Bunch, which NuMetro has just released in South Africa for purchase by film fans on “sell-through” video. Woo also choreographs violence similarly: shooting scenes at different rates of speed and cutting between these, thus vertiginously shifting his own and audience perceptions.
Bullet in the Head’s hysteria and poetry are not mirrored in Speed. But a Hong Kong action influence on that movie’s stunts and setpieces is visible. With Pulp Fiction, the new opus by Quentin Tarantino — who, by his own admission, stole half of his own shtick from Woo — about to open at the South African International Film Festival, his earlier Reservoir Dogs finally scheduled for local release, and the Tarantino-written, Oliver Stone- directed Natural Born Killers presumably also slated for local release, audiences can now hopefully anticipate more — and better — action movies which fuse velocity and clarity with real fervour and passion. That’ll make a change from continental snoreathons: maybe even wake `em up in Rosebank.