By KateLynn Savidan
There is a new form of violence emerging in mainstream Hollywood cinema.
A veritable ballet of blood, this new violence is a far cry from that made popular by Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. It is a controlled carnage, a highly choreographed dance of bullets, blood and death, where bodies and bullets fly gracefully and stylized through the air.
This is the type of violence action movies should embrace. But viewers beware: if you think “beautiful violence” is an oxymoron, then this is not for you. This is not violence for shock value. This is beauty in the act of death.
This sort of violence is for Die Hard action fans who wish for a Stallone or Willis movie with the style and elegance of an MGM musical. Even those film fans who can’t sit through Reservoir Dogs without closing their eyes and feeling sick would enjoy it.
I offer myself as an example. I still cringe in my seat during the prison scenes in Natural Born Killers and could barely keep my eyes open during Alien Resurrection. But sit me down in front of Face\Off or Rumble in the Bronx and I can’t get enough.
Instead of the rough, gratuitous violence of the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs, film-goers can enjoy lots of slow-motion, much-too-cool gun battles with minimal amounts of blood and guts. Why watch an innocent man being dismembered when you can watch Chow Yun-Fat take down bad guys to the beat of Crystal Method?
This genre has been slow coming to Hollywood. It was born in Hong Kong and has arrived in mainstream cinema through action stars Jackie Chan (Supercop) and Chow Yun-Fat (The Replacement Killers) and director John Woo (Face\Off).
This should make film-goers extremely happy. A breath of fresh air has drifted into the stale action genre. Maybe one day we won’t have to sit through two-and-a-half hours of Bruce Willis stumbling his way through saving the world. Like film critic Andrew Sarris once said, “I am tired of people smashing other people and things in the name of freedom and self expression.”
He was referring to the way violence hinders the artistic merit of many films. But one look at Chow Yun-Fat take on 15 mafia bad guys “spicy-handed” (a gun in each hand) or Jackie Chan fight martial arts style with a ladder and a wheel barrow and there is no denying it: violence can be art.