Around the year 2000 there was a sudden boom of East Asian influence in Hollywood action films. Actors like Jackie Chan and Jet Li were everywhere and martial arts movies like The Matrix and Rush Hour trilogies, Romeo Must Die, Shanghai Noon and Kill Bill filled cinemas. Hong Kong action cinema, specifically, had taken a hold of Hollywood and was intent on moulding the western action genre into something more resembling its own image. For most of the 20th century, American action scenes were often stilted and would focus much more on conveying the emotions of the fight and the actions of the scene rather than how each action was executed. With this new style, deliberate camera placement and editing would give clearer spatial awareness and flow of motion between shots, combined with detailed choreography and stunt work to make fights more legible and visually impressive.
It started in 1996 when Jackie Chan’s Rumble in the Bronx was released in North American cinemas and was the hit that started his massively successful Hollywood career. He’d tried a couple of times in the 80s to break into the west’s film industry, but nothing quite stuck. Between Bruce Lee’s death in 1973 and Rumble in the Bronx, the Hollywood action genre was too satisfied with itself to look elsewhere for influence. If audiences wanted kung fu, they’d see a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, and that was enough. Hong Kong action was just a video store niche. But in the 90s, when Jackie Chan once again tried to make his career international, audiences were finally ready; and it wasn’t just the start of his own Hollywood career, it was the start of a movement.
By the end of the 90s, Hong Kong cinema’s influence over Hollywood was already clear. Chan continued to lead in successful English-language action movies, most notably 1998’s Rush Hour alongside Chris Tucker, allowing him to lean into his comedic side he was known for in Asia. Other Hong Kong action stars like Chow Yun Fat were attempting to find similar success in their own American action films. Blade brought back 70s Blaxploitation kung fu supercharged with the complex action choreography that was pioneered by director’s like John Woo. Woo, possibly the most influential Hong Kong action director of the 80s and 90s also saw his biggest financial success up to that point with 1997’s Face Off starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. In 1999 all this culminated in The Matrix, arguably the single most impactful action movie ever made.
The fast-paced, extravagant gunfights and intricately choreographed action of The Matrix, directed by Lilly and Lana Wachowski, held what would become some of the most recognisable imagery of the genre. Yuen Woo-ping, a frequent Jackie Chan and Jet Li collaborator, choreographed The Matrix Trilogy’s martial arts scenes with his authentic Hong Kong approach and he continued to work on Hollywood films like Quentin Tarintino’s Kill Bill: Vol.1 and 2, Jet Li’s Unleashed, as well as Keanu Reeves’s sole directorial credit, Man of Tai Chi. The Matrix cemented this new filmmaking style in the cultural consciousness of western audiences and filmmakers alike, and became the primary reference point for many on how action movies should be presented stylistically, tonally, and visually for almost a decade. The next few years would give way to countless imitators.
Momentum increased with the new millennium. Jackie Chan continued to establish himself as an international icon with Shanghai Noon and his own cartoon, Jackie Chan Adventures, that would continue to run for five seasons until 2005. Hong Kong martial arts legend Jet Li led his first English language film, Romeo Must Die, marking the beginning of a successful Hollywood career as a leading man. John Woo took over from Brian De Palma on the Mission: Impossible series for its sequel, replacing De Palma’s suspenseful espionage with the bombastic action he’s known for. Nevertheless, the most notable film of the genre to release in 2000 was Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping). It introduced the exclusively Asian wuxia genre to international audiences, though it never caught on, most likely due to it being so culturally different to what audiences were used to. Despite being a Mandarin-language film, it won four Academy Awards and remains the highest grossing foreign language film in the United States ever.
At this point, western audiences couldn’t get enough of this new upheaval. The popularity of the genre was at a peak that would last from around 2001 to 2004. Jackie Chan was appearing in a constant stream of blockbusters, on top of his own cartoon. Distributors even took one of his earliest appearances, Police Woman, and released it on home video under the new title Rumble in Hong Kong, to take advantage of his success. Jet Li had also become quite popular during this time, appearing in grittier, more mature martial arts films as well as Hero, another Mandarin language wuxia to find huge international acclaim. American lead action films were full of East Asian influence during this time. Quentin Tarintino’s Kill Bill duology was his own take on 70s Japanese, Chinese, and Hong Kong martial arts movies including legendary actors from the era like Sonny Chiba and Gordon Liu. The Matrix sequels leaned further into their wuxia influence with increasingly extreme displays of martial arts. And films like Underworld, Blade 2 (with fight choreography by Donnie Yen) and Equilibrium embraced the Hong Kong action subgenres gun fu (martial arts involving superhuman skill with guns) and heroic bloodshed (violent melodrama), which were popularised by directors John Woo and Ringo Lam in the late 80s and 90s.
By 2004 Jackie Chan began to lose interest in Hollywood. The differences in the American and Hong Kong film industries became frustrating. As an action star associated with comedic roles, Chan found himself stuck being cast in family oriented adventure-comedies that lacked some of the edge of his Hong Kong films. The filmmaking process was also much different. Action set pieces for these movies were given less importance and held to a lower standard of quality, leading to the films receiving less critical praise than his earlier work for not having the elaborate action scenes and stunt work that his biggest critical successes were commended for.
His Hollywood leading roles slowed until The Spy Next Door released in 2010 as the last of the family action comedies he had become known for to western audiences, he appeared in some smaller roles and sporadically lead in a couple of English language films since then but never came close, or even showed concern, for recreating his heights in international popularity. Instead, he returned to Chinese language films, broadening his career by focusing more on dramatic roles. Jet Li followed a similar path, having stepped back from American starring roles by 2008. Highlights of the final years of the era included the Wachowskis’s V for Vendetta, and the Jason Statham lead Transporter 2 and Transporter 3. It was clear the time of strongly Asian influenced Hollywood blockbusters was over and it was already clear what was next. The X-Men series and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy had brought the superhero genre to the forefront in the early 2000s, and in 2008, The Dark Knight, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Hancock, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk proved how expansive of a genre it was.
Though the prevalence of these movies have lessened since the early 2000s, their legacy can be seen everywhere. The stylistic sensibilities of East Asian action scenes in those films have stuck within the industry and continue to make the genre more exciting. Films as mainstream and American as the Russo Brothers’s work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and places unexpected like Edgar Wright’s The World’s End, a sci-fi comedy – not an action movie – which had its fight scenes choreographed by Bradley James Allan, a frequent Jackie Chan collaborator on films like Mr. Nice Guy and the Rush Hour trilogy. John Woo hasn’t directed a Mission: Impossible since 2000 yet the fast paced, elaborate action he introduced remains an iconic part of the series. Huge films as recent as Everything Everywhere All at Once and John Wick: Chapter 4, which both received almost universal acclaim, and both totally inconceivable without The Matrix, wear their Asian influences with pride; both feature iconic Asian action stars like Michelle Yeoh, Donnie Yen, and Hiroyuki Sanada, as well as other action stars like English actor and stunt coordinator Scott Adkins, who’s stunt career begun with Jackie Chan’s The Accidental Spy and The Medallion and Jet Li’s Unleashed before graduating into a leading man of smaller action movies, or especially intimidating villains of bigger films like John Wick 4 and Donnie Yen’s Ip Man 4. The John Wick series, directed by Chad Stahleski, in particular have become some of the most influential action films of the last decade. Stahleski doubled for Keanu Reeves in The Matrix and worked as a stunt coordinator on its sequels until finding immediate directorial success in 2014 with John Wick; though his career initially began as a stunt double for Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, the first Asian Hollywood action star.
