Legendary action director John Woo’s historical drama Red Cliff is already the most successful Chinese film ever, but it remains to be seen whether that will translate to success in the United States—something Woo has had difficulty achieving despite his Western sensibilities.

One of the most influential directors of the past two decades has had a rocky career since emigrating to the United States in 1993. The Chinese-born director John Woo transformed the Hong Kong cinema by bringing a strong modern Western sensibility, particularly an affinity for complex characters with multiple levels of motivation. His late 1980s films films for producer Tsui Hark are classic action films: melodramas with real imagination and moral insights.

A Better Tomorrow, The Killer,and Hard-Boiled provide the kind of propulsive operatic, bravura action the movies do better than any other form of expression, and they also mean something, with Woo’s concern evident not only for innocents caught up in difficult circumstances but also for the non-innocents who recognize their lives are out of order. Woo showed a clear awareness of both people’s need for redemption and the possibility it could be achieved. That makes his best films stand out from the general run of action movies and even the works of respected directors such as Peckinpaugh, Coppola, and Scorsese.

But what really caught people’s attention in Woo’s work was not the intelligence or wisdom but instead his over-the-top inventiveness at creating action scenes. The scene in which several characters hold each other at gunpoint, none daring to shoot first, is a Woo invention that has been copied endlessly since.

It should hardly surprise us, then, that Hollywood lured Woo to our side of the Pacific and that his films there were inconsistent at best. His first American film, Hard Target, was a Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle that was edited to death because it earned an NC-17 rating in its original cut. Broken Arrow and Face/Off were terrific, but Mission Impossible 2 was a bloated mess in which he should never have become involved, and Windtalkers was surprisingly uninspired.

There’s possibly an interesting subtext in the film which may reflect the director’s feelings at the time: the struggles of the film’s Navaho codebreakers to fit into an alien Western military culture could reflect Woo’s difficulties in bringing his deeper sensitivities into play when his Hollywood employers just wanted bigger explosions and faster chases. Maybe, but the film isn’t interesting enough to make us want to think about it.

Paycheck (2003) was something of a rebound for him, as it showed he could still make a strong action film with some thought behind it, but soon afterward Woo left the United States to make a four-hour, two-part epic film based on the beloved Chinese historical epic novel The Romance of Three Kingdoms, starring Tony Leung, one of Hongkong’s most popular actors.

Woo’s choice to return to his roots appears to have paid off both financially and aesthetically, according to reports from China. Since it opened in Chinese theaters on July 10, Red Cliff has already become the highest-grossing Chinese film ever, with its $44 million of ticket sales as of  Monday breaking the record set by Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower in 2006, which brought in about $40 million in China.

The China Daily reported a representative of the company that produced and distributed Red Cliff said he expected the film to remain popular and overtake the overall record holder in Chinese theatrical film box office sales, Titanic, which brought in just over $52 million.

Part 2 will hit Chinese theaters in December. The two-part Red Cliff is the most expensive Chinese film ever made, at $80 million. The China Daily notes that it is indeed an epic production: "It is based on a well-known historical battle in 208 AD in which thousands of ships were burnt. Magnificent battle scenes are one of its biggest features."

The film will open the Tokyo International Film Festival in October, and will be shown in a single-episode, much-shortened edit in the United States. The expected U.S. release date has not yet been announced.

Red Cliff marks another milestone in being the first collaboration between director Woo and the equally legendary action sequence designer and director Cory Yuen. An interesting article at ITN’s Kung Fu Cinema site provides additional information on the film’s action sequences and includes video from a Chinese-language film about Yuen’s action choreography in Red Cliff.

The promotional trailer for the Cannes Film Festival showing earlier this year is available here.