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The films of John Woo, the renowned action filmmaker from Hong Kong, are celebrated by critics and enjoyed by audiences for their scenes of excessive violence and mass destruction. His films may be seen as firmly in the genre of the action film-a genre associated with a male audience; however, the reviews of his films describe them in terms that are usually associated with melodrama-a genre associated with a female audience. Terrence Rafferty in a review of Broken Arrow (1996) for the New Yorker says:
At their best, [Woo's] movies build to a near-hysterical pitch of cheeky ingenuity and violent excess, and, because they are, for the most part, defiantly unrealistic, their brutality has a giddy, oddly innocent quality. (97)
David Bordwell in his book on Hong Kong cinema states:
The Killer is a triumph of sheer romanticism, recycling clich6s with unabashed conviction: the blinded beloved who needs an operation, the innocents wounded in the crossfire, the crook who must pull one last job, the cop who becomes fascinated with his quarry, the aging professional who recovers his dignity in a final act of courage. Each element is pushed to the limit, steeped in sentiment, swathed in dreamy hyperbolic. (106)
Lastly, Verina Glaessner in her article on Woo in Sight and Sound says:
Beneath a thick wrapping of wordless and extended scenes of destructive mayhem, [Hard-Boiled) contains a meditation on personal and national identity and its loss .... Menace is generated not merely from stunt pyrotechnics but also from Woo's Oshima-like awareness of the threat contained in sterile modernist spaces and the fragility of the human body. (42)
The terms used by Rafferty to describe Woo's films-hysterical, excessive, and unrealistic-are terms frequently used to describe the visual qualities of melodrama; those used by Bordwell to describe Woo's film The Killer (1989)-romantic, cliched, steeped in sentiment, and hyperbolic-are terms often used to describe the narratives of melodrama; and the ideas raised by Glaessner in relation to Hard-Boiled (1992)-muteness ("wordless"), physical gesture replacing verbal expression for the ineffable, and buildings, objects, and interiors expressing the psychic and emotional states of the characters-are classic characteristics of melodrama. Although these critics may not have consciously intended to, they have described Woo's work in terms usually reserved for melodrama, not...