ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
NOVEMBER 25, 2011
Hollywood's New Kick
From Russell Crowe to Steven Soderbergh, top actors and directors are leaping into the global market for martial-arts movies. Why everybody is kung fu fighting.
By DON STEINBERG
In "Haywire," director Steven Soderbergh's movie due in January, Gina Carano is an international black-ops agent whose handlers betray her, so she needs to beat the brains out of a series of gentlemen, using roundhouse head kicks, low leg sweeps, suffocating choke holds and limb-cracking arm bars. Ms. Carano, a star mixed-martial-arts competitor, is demure and brutal in her leading-lady debut opposite veterans including Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor and Antonio Banderas. She looks like the cute girl in your office, if the cute girl could choke out Michael Fassbender with a leg triangle.
Four Decades of Martial Arts Movies
Forty years after Bruce Lee's "Fists of Fury" hit U.S. theaters in 1971, martial-arts movies are hitting the A list. The kung fu fix that we used to mainline from Hong Kong—with a little help from Japanese samurai flicks and artless American duds—now is available from a surprising number of countries.
As the world is shrinking, it's also coming together in its appreciation of kicking, lunging and screaming. Filmmakers in countries like Thailand and Indonesia do just fine feeding their own high-powered local economies—Asia-Pacific box office was up 21% in 2010. But everyone is exporting, too, with an especially covetous eye on China, especially if import restrictions lift.
Gareth Evans is a Welshman who directed "The Raid," an Indonesian action film which features the martial art known as silat. "This genre travels well," he says "You don't need to understand a foreign language to understand a martial-arts film." Sony snapped up the U.S. rights to "The Raid," one of several new films tailored partly for Western audiences, a generation happily raised on videogame mayhem.
Hollywood also is gearing up with bigger-budget films, with better scripts, more-accomplished directors, and bigger stars than Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme. With international revenues increasingly important, studios are targeting Asia with all kinds of films: "Avatar" and "Inception" were big hits in China. But "Kung Fu Panda 2" broke the opening-weekend record there this summer.
The marquee names attached to martial-arts projects are piling up like Uma Thurman's body count in "Kill Bill." Ryan Gosling has been training in Muay Thai to star in "Only God Forgives," about an exile in Bangkok who takes on nasty gangsters, to be directed by his "Drive" director Nicolas Winding Refn. Leonardo DiCaprio is attached to a planned series of films based on the Don Winslow novel "Satori," about a martial-arts-trained assassin. Keanu Reeves has wrapped up "47 Ronin," a Japanese martial-arts epic due next November, and plans to make his directorial debut helming "Man of Tai Chi," which he says will include 18 fights and 40 minutes of kung fu action.
Russell Crowe recently finished shooting "The Man With the Iron Fists" in Shanghai with Lucy Liu. The gory kung fu extravaganza was co-scripted by Eli Roth and musician RZA, who directed it.
"It's a blend of classic kung fu moviemaking with Hollywood storytelling," says RZA, whose rap group Wu-Tang Clan got its name from his lifelong fanaticism for vintage kung fu flicks.
Filmmakers already redid "The Karate Kid"—now there's talk of a feature-film version of the 1970s TV series "Kung Fu." In December, Robert Downey Jr. will display kung fu mastery in the "Sherlock Holmes" sequel, battling Dr. Moriarty in a climactic balcony fight. Next July, Christian Bale will put his kung fu training to work again as Batman, facing a villain played by Tom Hardy, who became a star this fall playing a mixed-martial-arts fighter in "Warrior," and with Anne Hathaway, who studied martial arts prepping to be Catwoman.
It's not hard to imagine why some of Hollywood's rich and famous have embraced martial arts. It's a lifestyle double play: Eastern philosophy plus a hard-core workout.
"We're in more of a fitness-obsessed Hollywood, an extreme-fitness-obsessed Hollywood," says Colin Geddes, a martial-arts-movie expert and programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival. So Evan Rachel Wood knows tae kwon do. Taylor Lautner and Courtney Cox do karate. Naomi Watts does Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
Mr. Downey has credited kung fu with helping him kick drugs. He has worked with Wing Chun kung fu trainer Eric Oram since 2003.
"I was his fight double in the first film [in 2009], but I didn't need to do much," says Mr. Oram, who also has trained Mr. Bale and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Asian pop culture began seeping into the West in the 1990s, with a stream of Japanese imports: "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers," Nintendo's Pokemon, "Iron Chef" and anime cartoons, notes Adam Ware, CEO of Mnet, a new U.S. cable channel featuring only Asian content. Decades of videogames like "Mortal Kombat" and "Street Fighter" have put martial arts in front of a generation. So have the karate and tae kwon do academies that seem to be in every town in America, trying to teach our kids some discipline. And mixed martial arts, where athletes combine Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Brazilian and American fighting styles, has exploded as a professional sport. The Ultimate Fighting Championship and Fox recently signed a $90 million, eight-year TV deal. (Fox is owned by News Corp., which publishes The Wall Street Journal.)
It's no surprise all this could lead to Michael Cera and Jason Schwartzman clashing swords in the comic-book-and-videogame-inspired movie "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" (2010), or Emily Browning facing a giant samurai in "Sucker Punch" (2011).
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