What Price Art?
Stunt actor-turned-director twins Albert and Herbert Leung relive, rethink and maybe revive the glory days of Hong Kong action.
Stuntman
Directors: Herbert Leung, Albert Leung • Writers: Anastasia Tsang, Oliver Yip
Starring: Terrance Lau, Stephen Tung, Philip Ng, Cecilia Choi, Max Cheung
Hong Kong • 1hr 53mins
Opens Hong Kong Sep 26 • IIB
Grade: B
Stuntman | 武替道 opens with a massive bang. Twin stunt performer/directors turned first-time feature directors Albert Leung Koon-yiu and Herbert Leung Kun-seun certainly paid attention to all those Sammo Hung movies they watched growing up. The movie begins 30-odd years ago, back during the heyday of Hong Kong filmmaking, when the city cranked out 300 or 400 movies every year, most of it schlock, but a great deal of it inspired action classics. Shit was crazy (Permit? Harness? What’s this nonsense?) and everyone was winging it, creating some of the most insane stunts, fights and chases ever put to film. If this were Hollywood we would call these the Cocaine ’80s. The opening credit sequence of Stuntman pays homage to that nuttiness, complete with sloppy non-sync-sound dialogue (time is money!), a synthy soundtrack, garish character generator credits and, of course, crazy stunts. And it. Is. Perfect.
It’s in this climate that young Sam Lee (Lam Yiu-sing) is directing a stunt that involves a fall off an overpass. The young actor that’s supposed to do the bit is nervous, and so Sam plucks another from the stable at the last minute to do it (again, time is money). It goes badly and the actor is paralysed. Decades later, Sam (now played by veteran actor, action choreographer and martial arts director Stephen Tung Wai, Enter the Dragon, Tsui Hark’s Seven Swords, Zhang Yimou’s Hero) is mostly living in obscurity, still haunted by that accident, when an old director friend (To Yin-gor) comes to him with a pitch for One Last Job. At the same time, budding stunt performer Long (Terrance Lau Chun-him, A Balloon’s Landing) is lurking in the margins of the industry, waiting for a break. He gets it when he encounters Sam while doing his day job. Long jumps at the chance to work on the “old school, ’80s-style” thriller, especially considering action superstar Wai (nice to see Philip Ng Wan-lung, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, finally getting some respect) is in it. Wai was the young actor who got nervous on Sam’s misguided stunt all those years ago.
No torch
The funny thing about Stuntman (possibly the only film to come from the FFFI that’s not an introverted drama), is that it’s short on stunts and long on contemplation of Hong Kong’s past, when filmmakers had the freedom to push boundaries, sometimes to dangerous lengths; its present, when the industry finds itself surpassed by the filmmakers it influenced for so long; and its future. Should it embrace the inevitable changes that are already on the way? Were the old ways better? They were certainly batshit and kind of exciting. Needless to say, co-writers Anastasia Tsang Hin-ning (A Light Never Goes Out) and Oliver Yip Wai-ping (The Sparring Partner) have crammed a lot of interpersonal narrative into Stuntman in order to explore these ideas. Some of that is going to be endlessly irritating for anyone expecting an action flick – though there’s a great robbery-chase about mid-way through – but in a film that can get very inside baseball about the industry it’s a much needed entry point.
That said, all those ideas muddy up the waters a bit, and the question becomes: Who is Stuntman about? Is it about Sam, the personification of the good/bad ol’ days, when it was all damn-the-torpedoes and let’s do crazy shit because we can, and sometimes create a little magic along the way? Sam’s obsessive nature is distilled in his icy relationship with his daughter Cherry (Cecilia Choi Si-wan), an industry orphan who’s still bitter about it, in part because Sam is still a crap father. His regrets and need for redemption are reflected in the equally icy relationship between him and the still-furious wife (Stephanie Che Yuen-yuen in a small but intense part) of the actor he put in a wheelchair (Keith Ng Shui-ting, Bursting Point) – who’s oddly less pissed than she is. Hey, he gets it. Then there’s Long’s brother (Max Cheung Tat-lun), who represents the smarter, more stable way forward in life that Long just isn’t feeling. He want to be impassioned. Is that the Hong Kong spirit he’s referring to? Is Stuntman about the city’s perpetually besieged film industry or about the city? All of the above? I’ll just leave that there.
In reality the real drama is between Sam (who has totally believable moments of on-set tyranny; I’ve worked for this type of asshole) and Wai, the old and the new, the traditional and the modern – and this is the most engaging of all the relationships in the film. Wai starts the story as a princess; the movie star who gets his way and makes goofy demands of everyone. But as time goes by and we learn more about his and Sam’s history, he morphs into a voice of reason. Sure, he respects Sam and his work in the crazy days, but he also recognises they were just that – crazy – and no one should be asked to spend life in a wheelchair for a movie. The Leungs play their cards close to the chest, and manage to acknowledge both the fantastic product of lunacy and that it can be achieved with less threat of dismemberment. At least we think so, because really? It’s that lunacy that made “Hong Kong style action” what it was. But if Stuntman is also about passing the torch to a new generation, it doesn’t truly fulfil that quest, and ends with Sam stealing Long’s thunder. Some will argue it’s the natural end destination of Sam’s character arc, some will say it cheats Long. Either way it asks if the glory days are gone for good, and if so, how do we get them back? Like the industry itself, Stuntman never quite regains the highs of its opening salvo, so the film ultimately doesn’t hint at a way forward. Except maybe going backwards. Just a bit.