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Viewpoints Chow Yun Fat – a rollercoaster career
Viewpoints Chow Yun Fat – a rollercoaster career | Chow Yun Fat – a rollercoaster career |
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| Viewpoints | |
| Monday, 30 April 2007 | |
 Coat-tails flapping, Chow Yun Fat strides through the Hong Kong classic A Better Tomorrow and becomes an icon. Twenty-one years later, coat-tails flapping once more, he strides out of the poster for Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and into multiplexes all over the world. It’s been a roller-coaster journey, but is Chow Yun Fat now at the peak of his powerful career?Ever since he exploded onto screens as the good-guy gangster in A Better Tomorrow, Chow Yun Fat has struggled to live down the action genre. As John Woo’s alter ego in A Better Tomorrow 2, Hard-Boiled, and The Killer, Yun Fat became the undisputed king of ‘heroic bloodshed’ movies. By contrast, though, the actor’s own favourites were the quieter dramas - All About Ah Long and An Autumn’s Tale. By 1994, he was at a crossroads: “I’m looking for a way to expand my talents and put myself in a market where I’m hardly known at all”. Like Jackie Chan, he wanted to crack Hollywood. But his action-man persona preceded him. With limited English, dramatic roles were unlikely. No surprise then that his first American features were imitations of Hong Kong thrillers. The Replacement Killers and The Corruptor did the business, but didn’t blaze a trail. Like Chan, Chow Yun Fat was hemmed in - partnered by American co-stars and unlikely to headline a film. Then, waiting on a John Woo project that never happened, Yun Fat suddenly hit the headlines as the King of Siam in a resplendent version of Anna and the King opposite Jodie Foster. The new millennium consolidated Yun Fat’s international image with Ang Lee’s Chinese world-wide smash, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Yet somehow, ‘kung fu fever’ won out over common sense, and the woeful Bulletproof Monk bombed. It was a wake-up call, and Chow Yun Fat disappeared from film-making for three years. Then, in 2006, he shot back to box-office acclaim in two diverse Chinese movies, Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower and Ann Hui’s comedy-drama The Postmodern Life of My Aunt. Together, they proved what we’d always known - Chow Yun Fat is at his best playing morally doubtful or cheekily comedic characters. Whether Chow Yun Fat’s future lies in the East or the West - or both - one thing is sure. For now, his rollercoaster career is riding high. And with Pirates of the Caribbean 3 on the horizon, he’s taking it in his stride. Glenn Watson |
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