Benny Chan, who has died
aged 58, was among the most prominent directors to have emerged in recent years
from the Hong Kong film industry’s genre sector, overseeing a run of
high-octane action pictures that thrilled local audiences before tearing onto
Western cinema screens.
His career was fashioned
in the image of his restless mentor Johnnie To, for whom Chan worked as an
assistant in HK television in the late 1980s. As To has, Chan worked skilful
variations on the theme of law-and-order, habitually returning to the sight of good
guys squaring off against bad, although he occasionally branched out into more
unusual territory, with mixed results.
In interviews, he spoke often
about his desire to develop beyond genre fare, but lamented that this ambition
was continually thwarted by producers thrusting another policier script upon
him: “When they come to Benny Chan,” he mused, “it must be about action.”
Nevertheless, in his better projects, the bespectacled, mild-mannered Chan
succeeded in imbuing his onscreen carnage with poetry and wit.
Born Chan Muk-sing in
Kowloon on October 7, 1961, he became a cinephile as a teenager, attending
matinees of the Shaw Brothers’ kung fu productions. Upon graduating in 1981,
Chan found work as a clerical assistant at local broadcaster Rediffusion TV,
but confessed he spent less time in the office than he did skulking around the
station’s studios and pestering the directors.
He got his shot upon
defecting to rival, Shaw-owned TVB a few years later, where he directed 37 and
wrote all 40 episodes of the action serial The Flying Fox of Snowy Mountain
(1985). After serving as an assistant on Raymond Wong’s cancer-themed comedy Goodbye
Darling (1987), he made his feature debut with A Moment of Romance
(1990), a star-crossed lovers melodrama starring local pin-up Andy Lau as a gangster
who falls for an heiress (Chien-Lien Wu).
Balancing sweeping action
with swooning drama, the film was a hit, and another sign of renewed confidence
within the HK industry: it opened in the period between John Woo’s early
successes The Killer (1989) and Bullet in the Head (1990), and
just months before Wong Kar-wai’s Days of Being Wild (1990).
Yet it was working
alongside his namesake Jackie Chan – then in the process of cracking the
American market – that the director achieved his biggest success, finding dynamic
ways to showcase the star’s trademark “chopsocky” (a lighter, more comic form
of kung fu, blending martial-arts with slapstick).
Who Am I? (1998) had a stock spy-movie plot – Chan’s amnesiac
agent is pursued by shadowy forces – but it was energised and elevated by the
director’s inventive staging: one sequence in Rotterdam saw the star repelling
his pursuers while clad in traditional Dutch clogs. Recut by distributors for
international release, the film performed well in Western multiplexes, doubly
so on home video.
They would reteam for New
Police Story (2004), named to remind the star’s fans of his wildly
successful 1980s series, but otherwise a very different proposition: here, the
now-fiftysomething Chan played the world-weary Inspector Wing, and attempted to
flex his dramatic muscles. This rebrand barely took: local audiences preferred
the Chans’ earlier, funnier work, and the film limped onto British screens two
years later to mixed reviews. (The Observer’s Philip French damned it as
“an addled affair”.)
Unhappier still was the
pair’s reunion on Rob-B-Hood (2006), a leaden comic caper about a pair
of thieves who find themselves minding a baby. The director confessed that
adding an infant to his star’s complex (and often injurious) stunt sequences
led to several of his darkest days; the film went straight-to-DVD in the
States, and undistributed in Britain.
Chan returned to form
with Connected (2008), a remake of the so-so Hollywood thriller Cellular
(2004) in which an everyman hero (future Captain America Chris Evans in the
original, director favourite Louis Koo here) takes a stray call from a
kidnapped woman and becomes implicated in her fate. Chan added not just a
climactic forklift truck rampage but believable characters to Larry Cohen’s
original story: in his version, the debt-collector hero is overburdened even
before he’s obliged to screech around town in a succession of amusingly
midrange cars.
A goofy fantasy about
circus performers given superpowers after coming into contact with a biohazard
abandoned by the Japanese during WW2, City Under Siege (2010) received
lacklustre reviews, and failed to make back its not inconsiderable budget. Shaolin
(2011), a remake of Jet Li’s 1982 debut, similarly struggled to recoup its
producers’ investment, in part due to its full-scale reconstruction of a 1920s
temple.
Yet the director returned
to surer ground with The White Storm (2014), his self-described John Woo
homage, loosely inspired by the Pablo Escobar story. And he won glowing reviews
for Call of Heroes (2016), a period actioner choreographed by Sammo Hung:
Variety described it as “a glorious throwback to the rustic vigour of
[the] Shaw Brothers”.
His weirdest credit followed
with Meow (2017), a would-be summer blockbuster involving an outsized
computer-generated feline. This calculated play for a family audience drew
indifferent reviews (“the action veteran would be smart to stick to his day
job”, advised the South China Morning Post); it opened on a single
British screen, taking a mere £118 on its opening weekend.
During shooting last year
on Raging Fire, a return to the crime genre starring Donnie Yen, Chan
was diagnosed with nasopharyngeal cancer, and handed the film over to
colleagues for post-production before undergoing treatment. (The film is
scheduled for release later in 2020.)
Asked about filmmaking in
2014, Chan said: “I always feel very complicated when thinking about it. I feel
everything – happiness, anger, sorrow, and happiness again – but I’ve never
considered it a job. Maybe that’s why I’ve survived so many things... I hope
that I can find my own world in the movies and pass that happiness onto the
audience, just like the happiness I took from films when I was a child.”
He is survived by a wife,
a son and a daughter.
Benny Chan, born October 7, 1961, died August 23, 2020.
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