Benny Chan
Leading film director in the Hong Kong action tradition who struggled to break free of the genre
BENNY CHAN, who has died aged 58, was one of the most prominent directors to have emerged in recent years from the Hong Kong film industry’s genre sector, overseeing high-octane action pictures including Who Am I? and New Police Story, that thrilled local audiences before tearing on to Western screens.
His career was fashioned in the image of his mentor Johnnie To, for whom Chan worked as an assistant in HK television in the late 1980s. Like To, Chan developed skilful variations on the theme of good guys squaring off against bad, while continuing in a long-running martial-arts tradition. In interviews Chan spoke often about his desire to develop beyond genre fare, but lamented that this ambition was thwarted by producers whose view he summarised as: “When they come to Benny Chan, it must be about action.”
Nevertheless, in his better projects, the bespectacled, mild-mannered Chan succeeded in imbuing the on-screen carnage with a degree of poetry and wit.
Born Chan Muk-sing in Kowloon on October 7 1961, he became a cinephile as a teenager, attending matinees of the kung fu productions of the Shaw Brothers’ studio. Graduating in 1981, he took a clerical job at Rediffusion Television. But he spent less time in the office than he did hanging around the studios and pestering directors.
Chan got his chance after defecting to the rival, Shaw-brothers-owned, TVB: there he directed 37 and wrote all 40 episodes of the action serial The Flying Fox of Snowy Mountain (1985).
He served as an assistant on Raymond Wong’s cancer-themed comedy
Goodbye Darling (1987), and made his feature film debut directing A Moment
of Romance (1990), a melodrama of star-crossed lovers starring the local pin-up Andy Lau as a gangster who falls for an heiress (Chien-lien Wu).
Balancing sweeping action with swooning drama, the film was a hit, and a sign of renewed confidence within the HK industry: it opened around the time of John Woo’s early successes The Killer (1989) and Bullet
in the Head (1990).
But the director achieved his biggest success collaborating with his namesake Jackie Chan – then cracking the American market – and finding dynamic ways to showcase the star’s trademark “chopsocky” (a form of kung fu that blended martial-arts with slapstick). Who Am I? (1998) had a stock spy-movie plot – Chan’s amnesiac agent is pursued by shadowy forces – but it was energised by the director’s inventive staging: one sequence in Rotterdam saw the star wearing traditional Dutch clogs as he repels his pursuers. Shot in English, the film performed well in Western multiplexes, doubly so on home video.
They would reteam for New Police Story (2004), named to remind the star Jackie Chan’s fans of his wildly successful 1980s series.
The now-fiftysomething
Chan played the world-weary Inspector Wing, and attempted to flex his dramatic muscles.
But audiences preferred the Chans’ earlier, funnier work, and The Observer’s Philip French damned it as “an addled affair”.
Unhappier still was the pair’s reunion on Rob-b-hood (2006), a leaden comic caper about a pair of thieves who find themselves minding a baby. The film went straight to DVD.
Benny Chan returned to form, however, with Connected (2008), a remake of the Hollywood thriller Cellular (2004) in which an everyman hero (the director’s favourite Louis Koo) takes a stray call from a kidnapped woman and becomes implicated in her fate. Chan added to the original story not just a climactic forklift truck rampage, but also believable characters.
City Under Siege (2010), a goofy fantasy about circus performers given superpowers after coming into contact with a biohazard abandoned by the Japanese during the Second World War, gained lacklustre reviews, and failed to make back its not inconsiderable budget; Shaolin (2011) similarly struggled.
Chan returned to surer ground with The White Storm (2014), his homage to John Woo, loosely inspired by the story of the cocaine baron Pablo Escobar. And he won glowing reviews for Call of Heroes (2016), a period action movie which Variety hailed as “a glorious throwback to the rustic vigour of [the] Shaw Brothers”.
His oddest credit followed with Meow (2017), a would-be summer blockbuster involving an outsized computer-generated feline. “The action veteran would be smart to stick to his day job,” advised the South China Morning Post.
During shooting last year on Raging Fire, a return to the crime genre, Chan was diagnosed with nasopharyngeal cancer, and handed the film to colleagues for post-production.
“I hope that I can find my own world in the movies,” Chan reflected, “and pass that happiness on to the audience, just like the happiness I took from films when I was a child.”
He is survived by his wife, a son and a daughter.
Benny Chan, born October 7 1961, died August 23 2020