by RICHARD CORLISS
Time Asia
26 January 1998, Vol. 151 No. 3

Hong Kong fans have long appreciated Chow Yun-fat's deadly on-screen grace. With The Replacement Killers set to open worldwide, he could become America's next big action star

It's not as if Chow Yun-fat doesn't know how to treat a lady. In a decade as Hong Kong's coolest movie star, his characters honed a code of macho courtship. The Killer: he blinds Sally Yeh with a stray gunblast. City on Fire: he runs out on lovemaking in the shower to check his beeper. Full Contact: instead of a wedding ring, he gives his girlfriend a deep bite mark on her arm. And in his last Hong Kong epic, Peace Hotel, he smacks Cynthia Yip with his son's copybook. So Mira Sorvino, Chow's co-star in his Hollywood debut The Replacement Killers, should have known what to expect.

But maybe Chow didn't. The 42-year-old actor, who in real life is a genteel and devoted husband, got an on-screen baptism of firearms from Sorvino that was as startling, though not as prolonged, as a shootout scene in one of Chow's great action films for director John Woo. The Mira tussle has already achieved legendary status, with rumors of bootleg tapes of the incident. In back-lot gossip it is known simply as The Fight.

Chow plays John Lee, an assassin on the lam in Los Angeles; Sorvino is Meg, a truculent forger he comes to for a passport home. In an early scene, Lee takes Meg hostage. She pulls a gun on him and holds it to his head. He then wrestles the gun away and throws her down on the bed. A simple, but pivotal, moment.

Antoine Fuqua, a specialist in commercials and music videos making his first feature film, took the actors aside individually and told each of them to perform the action as realistically as possible. The result was more than he bargained for. "Once they got into the scene and started playing the characters," recalls Fuqua, "it became so intense I had to yell Îcut' and just let them chill out for a couple of minutes. She was poking him in the head with the gun, really putting a lot of pressure on his temple. Then he grabbed it and slammed her onto the bed and put the gun under her neck."

Fuqua feels the blowup heightened the film's immediacy: the characters are supposed to have a hate-hate relationship. And, hey, it's just acting, baby."Obviously, Yun-fat is such a gentleman he would never deliberately hurt her. And she would never hurt him. But they're both intense actors. Yun-fat really gets into it, and Mira's a Method actress. It's a movie set, so things like that happen."

Chow, who to fans and reporters is gracious to a fault--or, rather, to perfection--waves away any talk of an on-camera dustup. He will concede that he finds Sorvino a "very interesting character" and that he is astounded by her way of preparing for the scene. "She screams a lot on the set," he says. "She said that screaming is a kind of preparation for the role. It is very interesting to see how she does that preparation. In the future," he adds drily, "maybe I can do the same."

Welcome to Hollywood, Yun-fat. A lot is riding on his trip: the almost unique opportunity for an Asian actor to become a mainstream Hollywood star. And since Hollywood films rule the box office in virtually every territory where they are freely shown, the release of The Replacement Killers (this week in Hong Kong and Feb. 6 in the U.S.) means that the world's most powerful image-makers have put their stamp of approval on the face of a new hero. A suave, sullen facet--unarguably compelling, unmistakably Chinese.

Chow has not come alone. Michelle Yeoh, Jackie Chan and Jet Li are among the Hong Kong stars who have followed the earlier Asian invasion of John Woo and other Hong Kong directors. But Chow has the most at stake. He is not shuttling across the Pacific, hedging his bets by continuing to shoot films back home. Hollywood is not a hobby; it's the next decisive step in a brilliant career. The Replacement Killers, which Chow describes as "a John Woo action film remake," is a bit less than brilliant, but it gets the job done. And it makes its star happy. "I am a lucky guy," says this longtime fan of Hollywood cinema. "There is one and only best American movie in your life. And now I am in it."

He could stay there for keeps because the time is right, say the Hollywood executives who have promoted Chow's career. "Look at the landscape," says Teddy Zee, a former executive at Columbia Pictures, which is distributing the film. "Steven Seagal has seen better days. Jean-Claude Van Damme is on the downside. And it's even getting harder for guys like Arnold and Stallone. We've had the same stable of action players for 10 years or more. With the age of movie-goers and a more sophisticated audience, there's a demand for something fresh. Yun-fat is it."

If the odds are even that he'll succeed in Hollywood, that's because Chow has made it this far on his terms. He took his time--three years--between Peace Hotel and this movie, putting himself at ease in a new land, waiting for the right film. But Chow has always been his own man. He was unusual among Hong Kong stars in that he didn't bother anglicizing his name. No Jackie, Stephen, Leslie or Jet. Take him as pure Chinese, with a moniker that sounds to Americans like a calorific pork dish at a Cantonese eatery. To see it on U.S. movie marquees is a small but significant victory for Asian pride.

A comfortable presence on Hong Kong TV serials from 1976, Chow blasted to big-screen stardom a decade later as the charming gunmanÜa sociopath with a soft heartÜin Woo's A Better Tomorrow. The film triggered a long fascination with "heroic bloodshed"; the producers must have gotten their ammo wholesale. The bullet ballets took place all over the city. They made restaurants a perilous place to be even before the chicken-flu scare. Neighborhood streets were torched to cinders; Tsimshatsui could have been mistaken for Beirut. For a decade, thanks in part to Chow, Woo and director Ringo Lam, Hong Kong was a city and a cinema on fire the world leader in action movies.

Chow's eminence exactly paralleled the golden age of Hong Kong cinema: 1986-95. And it wasn't limited to killer roles. He could be funny or sensitive; one of his three Hong Kong Film Awards for best actor (he was nominated 12 times) was for his role as a father in Johnny To's 1989 All About Ah Long, a kind of Hong Kong Kramer vs. Kramer. And Chow always scored with the paying customers. His God of Gamblers' Return was Hong Kong's top-grossing film of 1994, beating two stalwart contenders: the Jackie Chan Drunken Master II and Stephen Chow's Bond spoof From Beijing With Love.

Chow's characters were richly cosmopolitan. He played the dapper gunman in scarf, tuxedo and color-coordinated Uzi. When he wore T shirts, they became the cream of chic. The bold fashion statement of Chow's long coats and dark shades so impressed a California videostore geek named Quentin Tarantino that the kid rushed out and bought the same outfit. (Tarantino, who helped Chow when the newcomer came to Los Angeles, is also Sorvino's boyfriend.)

In Woo films, Chow occasionally got to dazzle in foreign climates, and even to speak English. In Once a Thief he swanked around Paris and the Riviera with Leslie Cheung. He does bilingual tough-talking in A Better Tomorrow; his on-screen pal Ti Lung says admiringly, "Your English is improved," and Chow, with a no-big-deal grin, almost sings out, "Of courrrrrse!" In A Better Tomorrow II he played a Chinese restaurateur in New York City and got to practice such primal Hollywood argot as "Drop the gun!" and "Don't f--- with my family!"

Speaking English in a $26 million American film is something else again. In fact, getting there was quite an achievement. Chow's agents at William Morris and his manager, Terence Chang, at first hoped to land him a strong supporting role to, say, Robert De Niro in, oh, a Martin Scorsese filmÜa property where he could shine but didn't have to carry the picture. Then Columbia's Zee started taking Chow to Hollywood premieres. "People would pull me aside and say, 'Who the hell is that guy? He should be a star.' He is a star." When Zee read the Replacement Killers script, originally angled as a smart-guy action film for a Bruce Willis type, he thought it could work for Chow. Ten exhausting drafts later, it did.

The actor spent hours with screenwriter Ken Sanzel, who streamlined the assassin's verbiage to make him closer to the soulful killers of the Woo and Lam films. Says Matthew Baer of Brillstein-Grey, the management and production firm that produced the movie: "We set out to develop Yun-fat's screen persona along the lines of Clint Eastwood--a guy who can be expressive with just a look. Yun-fat has that same amazing ability to express himself without saying anything, and it worked well for his first English film."

Still, it was an ordeal. "It's difficult for me," Chow says, "because I have to take care of the language, the tone and my facial expression at the same time. I kept on speaking 'my condolences' in a berserk way--it took them ages to have me fixed." These are his first words in the film, and they still come out as a slurry, if genial, "My condorences." After that, Chow relaxes and the international moviegoer's ear becomes attuned to the forceful music of his delivery--and the ferocious silence of his stare.

He flashes it in the film's first scene. John Lee strides into a bustling disco and, without a word, kills four people. Before one murder, he executes the flourish of a full twist--he's the Fred Astaire, the Brian Boitano of carnage. He and Sorvino have no special chemistry, but their roles are adversarial. Anyway, subtle characterization is not needed. The plot and dialogue are rest stops between the imposingly violent production numbers. Fuqua's background in videos and love of Hong Kong melodrama blend to create a style you might call HK-MTV. He keeps up its pulse and body count while aping famous Woo motifs: low-angle shots, the devout fetishizing of artillery, even a variation of the basic plot of Woo's 1997 hit Face/Off. There, a killer shoots a cop's son; here, John Lee doesn't have the heart to do it. Because he does have a heart. Because he's Chow.

Fuqua, who first saw the actor "floating through the room in a beautiful Armani suit" at a 1996 Oliver Stone party, admires the dialogue scenes in Chow's old films. "But he's at his best when he's silent and deadly." Chow was grateful for the direction. "Antoine was very encouraging," he says. "He asked me not to care too much about the language, just keep the expression. Yet, there's still time when you find yourself trapped in a language which is not your own." To practice, he would phone Fuqua at 3 a.m. and talk about word usage. Says the director, "He told me his favorite English term was 'thank you for your hospitality.'"

Before shooting began, Fuqua took Chow and Sorvino to a farm where they could fire off tons of guns in preparation for the film's heavy artillery scenes. The director wanted Chow to have the experience of running out of ammunition--something he never seemed to do in those Hong Kong flicks (in A Better Tomorrow he fires, by our count, 51 rounds out of two sixshooters). "The funny thing," says Fuqua, "is that Yun-fat doesn't like guns at all. When he's done shooting them on the set, he hands them right back to the prop guy. Some actors go around fighting in bars, trying to live up to their macho hero status. Yun-fat does it on screen better than most, and then he goes home to his wife and garden."

Woo, who served as an executive producer on The Replacement Killers, says he warned Chow about "Hollywood politics--there are a lot of games going on. I told him to ignore them and concentrate on his acting. In general, he was extremely happy. He had a lot of confidence and made lots of new friends." Woo believes Hong Kong audiences will embrace the film. "The people in Asia really miss him. Now he's back playing the same kind of character emotionally, but he's at a new, international level. Audiences will be surprised to hear him speak English, but at the same time they'll admire his courage. They love him."

So Mr. Chow has gone to Hollywood. But don't expect him to "go Hollywood"--to surrender to the crushing glamour and excess of the place. "I see acting as a job," he says. "An actor is like a worker working in a factory. After that, I return to my real life." He happily spends that life with his wife Jasmine in a rented home in Southern California, while preparing for at least two more American films, one for Woo and one for Stone. Any other dream? He flashes the Chow smile and says, "To be a dumb actor in a movie." In his precise new English, he means non-talking, of course. No one could accuse Chow Yun-fat of being any other kind of dumb. If he can handle Mira Sorvino, the rest of Tinseltown should be a breeze.

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