In my opinion, what made BuyBust forgettable was that because of the director’s choice to focus mostly on the characters’ emotions and human motivations outside of their job instead of focusing more on the action. It made them not connect that well with the audience as an action movie. When you really think about it, as operators, they spend most of their lives training and honing their craft. Why wouldn’t they be able to express their motivations through combat?
What made The Raid such a special movie is that it was a full-blown action movie that also made people connect with its characters, including its main antagonist — who was physically smaller than the protagonists, yet exuded such menace and venom through his fighting prowess that he metaphysically stood taller than all of them combined.
Mad Dog did in a serious movie what The Beast did in Kung Fu Hustle — a comedy action movie with more gravitas than those schlocky Marvel movies.
There’s a disconnect between practitioners and non-practitioners of martial arts and other physical disciplines when it comes to action and theatrical fighting.
Examples of movies that combine both action and emotion well are Troy and The Grandmaster.
A lot of that video essay may be hogwash, but it still gets the point across that the way it was shot and how the action was portrayed in Troy as integral to the storytelling and character development.
You could tell Wong Kar-wai wanted to break the pre-established rules of martial arts films in The Grandmaster, so much that parrots like to say that Wong Kar-wai is a rookie when it comes to action.
However, he has brilliantly incorporated action in his past films, so he’s well aware of those rules. He could direct a John Woo-esque movie if he wanted to, but that’s something best left for Tsui Hark (not a diss, I love Tsui Hark films as well).
But despite using mostly close-up shots for The Grandmaster, it strangely doesn’t make the mistakes it’s supposed to make. You can actually see the technical distinctions between kung fu styles, how the characters are feeling as they fight, and the philosophical back and forth between them as they fight. It actually does action storytelling better than many other pure action films because it does one thing right — it doesn’t do action just for action’s sake.
From what I heard, the reason Erik Matti wanted to make the action in BuyBust to be more natural in flow, which is why there were only a few sprinklings of martial arts action in it. You see an instance of Filipino martial arts in it, and that was it.
It was likely because he didn’t want to do action for action’s sake, but perhaps he didn’t have enough faith in the action itself to be able to communicate his characters’ emotions.
When those characters are operators — police and paramilitary, who spend most of their careers training and drilling to be good at fighting bad guys — you need to be able to show them doing their job. That’s their life, so why would you not show them living that life?
It’s like how pro wrestlers are often told that the more they do in the ring, the less coherent they supposedly are. There’s a school of thought that suggests the wrestling itself takes away from storytelling, even if the premise is supposed to be about how the wrestling is storytelling itself. The less you have to do to tell a story, the better it should be.
I don’t think this is always true. Sometimes, especially if you have wrestlers who have transcendental physical talents, doing more in the wrestling actually tells more because they spent their entire lives getting good at that thing. That means something.
And you’re having a pretentious snob who can’t even do a pushup tell you that what you do doesn’t mean anything? Get the fuck out.
This is a sin constantly committed by artists and storytellers who are also non-practitioners of the combative arts. To them, fighting is just fighting; to practitioners, there’s a difference between aimlessly flailing your arms around and actually knowing how to fight through practice and pressure testing. Blood, sweat, and tears.
If you think violence doesn’t say anything, then why would you even put elaborate violence in your movies? You could’ve done what Kinji Fukusaku did in Battles Without Honor and Humanity by having his actors tumble around while he shook the camera vigorously to depict violence. No one knows how to fight or even shoot a gun properly, yet they are so eager to enact violence upon each other.
Instead of treating martial arts like they’re unwanted mutations that you only want to be shown a couple of times, make them more like superpowers. Different characters excelling in different styles, but perhaps that’s too anime for you.
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