The Movies That Moved Me: Anton Fuqua’s THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS
It’s 1998, and Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Michelle Yeoh have already made their crossovers via their appearances in Hong Kong and Hollywood releases, marking an albeit second new wave of Asian action for fans of the genre at the time. Lo and behold comes the likes of Chow Yun-fat, another glowing contender whose own career garnered considerable success as a Hong Kong star under hitmakers like Ringo Lam and John Woo.
To date, the latter, whose own career followed a similar, albeit tenuous path in the West, remains a frontrunner for anyone fond of the classics, including the white-hot 1992 cop procedural, Hard Boiled. I’ll talk more about that movie in a later piece, while it certainly helps that a film like The Replacement Killers is right where we also get to see Woo’s influence. To add, it’s also not a bad way to start a career seeing it was director Antoine Fuqua’s feature debut – on a film which Woo produced, no less – and I kind of wish he made more of these.
This isn’t to write off any of the other work Fuqua directed in the years that followed. I especially enjoyed Shooter and Olympus Has Fallen, and the current Equalizer trilogy out of his career of over two decades, but I definitely wouldn’t say no if he offered up some more balletic gunplay action in the same vein of Woo.
The Replacement Killers follows the simple, time-honored story of revenge and redemption with Chow starring along with Mira Sorvino, Kenneth Tsang, and Michael Rooker. Chow plays John, a hitman assigned to a third and final task for a vengeful triad boss named Wei, only to betray him and instead, seek new papers in an effort to jettison to China to prevent the backlash he expects unto his family. With the life of a cop’s seven-year-old son hanging in the balance, however, John has no choice but to stand toe-to-toe against Wei, his men, and a pair of newly hired killers equally skilled as John is.
This isn’t a traditional review so I won’t go into a full-blown analysis of it. What I will say is that the action, in addition to Chow’s charismatic screen presence and overall caliber, is what helped compel me to climb down the rabbit hole of heyday Hong Kong releases at my local VHS store. The term “bullet ballet” struck me as something I should have been witness to by then, and it frustrated me that I only just discovered it.
Additionally, that kind of action comes with a price as I reckon the toll it takes on actors. I didn’t even know about the time Chow fired 546 rounds and did multiple takes, resulting in his hands blistering and shaking on set. That kind of stress can be heavy, and I get why, among other possible reasons, Chow probably stepped back from roles like these.
He sure did leave a mark though, a fact made clear by the dutiful preservation of his earlier hits up for re-release from Shout! after acquiring more than 100 titles of the Golden Princess library. I’ll always envy folks who started their journey around those films, but if you’re like me and you had to start somewhere, The Replacement Killers was definitely a film that suited us at the time. It’s got some real glowing moments, including the scene featuring Chow and Sorvino interrogating the shit out of Clifton Collins Jr. to the ambient beats and rhymes of Ithaka on “Escape From The City Of Angels”. That song almost fits the whole scene which makes it a brilliant edit that compliments the film as it winds up the explosive finale.
Lead image: Sony Pictures Releasing
