Feature

Hollywood Meets Hong Kong

The Stunt Performers Who Changed American Action

With Extraction 2 getting ready to drop (the sequel to what was then the highest-streaming Netflix film ever), star Chris Hemsworth is back in the spotlight for something other than his role as Thor. But Hemsworth would likely be the first to admit that the real star of Extraction (2020) was director/cameraman/stunt coordinator/actor Sam Hargrave. With Extraction 2, Hargrave is confirming his place in the pantheon of new action film directors who’ve forced open the sometimes miserly gatekeepers of film criticism.

Even film snobs who might look down their nose at an action film that takes itself seriously have been forced to praise the phenomena of The Matrix (1999), John Wick (2014), and other taut actioners of late. And no offence to Keanu Reeves, but that’s less to do with him and more to do with those behind-the-scenes. Intense action scenes, paired with cameras capturing what the performers are doing and not hiding it with edits. Something Jackie Chan figured out a long time ago is that if you really do the work, and you let the audience see, they’ll show up. It’s been slow-going for Hollywood to come on board to that philosophy, however, and it actually didn’t even start with Chan. It began with one of his heroes he met, flying out a window, early in his Hong Kong stuntman career: Bruce Lee.

Sam Hargrave also grew up in the era of Bruce Lee… not his actual life, but the era of his second life. Like Jesus, Lee rose again in the form of Enter the Dragon (1973), his best-known film in the west, released there just days after he had died. A cinema god promising action film salvation, suddenly the recently-departed Lee had a congregation clamouring for more sermons from the mount, and film studios obliged. They brought over his earlier films and released them in the US, re-titling them to make sense for a western audience. Way of the Dragon (猛龍過江), actually released in 1972, became Return of the Dragon for the US in 1974. With its long, gritty showdown between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris in the Roman Coliseum, this served as a perfect follow-up to Enter the Dragon for Western audiences, setting a new standard for what action stars, and what action in film, should be.