Butterfly

I’ve been watching Butterfly, on Amazon Prime.  It only runs six episodes, unfortunately, ending in a cliffhanger, so that’s discouraging.  The ratings fell off, and the show wasn’t renewed.  I happen to like it a lot, but I admit it doesn’t break new ground.  You might find it similar to Citadel, for example.  My opinion, Butterfly is sharper and better acted, but it’s still slight, not chewy. 

Premise.  Private security contractor, with lethal skills, wants out.  Fakes his death, and drops off the radar.  Some ten years later, he resurfaces, to rescue his abandoned daughter, who’s now – you guessed it – an assassin for the same murder-for-hire crew the hero tried to shut the door on a decade before.  He makes contact, but of course her assignment from corporate is to kill him, and drop his body into a deep hole in the ocean. 

That’s the set-up, and what ensues is a lot of escape and evasion, awkward attempts at familial reconciliation, and a plethora of blood squibs.  So, yes, a little too familiar.  On the other hand, the production values are very high, terrific camerawork and fight choreography, very lucid and graceful, and physically intuitive.  The two leads are extremely effective, Daniel Dae Kim (Lost, among others - and he exec produces) and Reina Hardesty, but despite their chemistry, the material is too thin to sustain.

As it happens, there’s a newly restored and marvelously crisp new print of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986) out on Kanopy.  [Kanopy is a streaming service available through local public libraries, and probably available through yours; check it out.  Many hard-to-find titles, and art pictures, like Criterion, but free.]  If you’re not aware of the who and what, John Woo was a Hong Kong moviemaker who came to Hollywood in the early 1990’s, but was already an influence on Scorsese, Sam Raimi, and Tarantino.  The producer/director Tsui Hark put together the money for A Better Tomorrow, and it wound up at the top of the box office. 

A Better Tomorrow is the template for the Hong Kong action pictures that came after it.  It doesn’t have the polish or discipline of the feverish Hard Boiled, from 1992, but it established John Woo and made Chow Yun Fat a bankable star.  The stylized, kinetic violence is vivid and visceral, and sets off the quieter, more emotional scenes of male bonding and domestic fracture.  The trope of doubling, or twinning, two main characters who mirror each other, in spite of their antagonisms, a staple of later John Woo films, is fixed here, first.  (It also shows up in many other Hong Kong policiers, such as the Infernal Affairs trilogy, the inspiration for Scorsese’s Departed.)  Like the conventions of Westerns, or screwball, they’re self-referential.

Not to speak disrespectfully of A Better Tomorrow, which was astonishing and original when it came out, but the reason I’m bringing it up, with reference to the more recent Butterfly, is that its execution was head-spinning, it announced a director who was reimagining the way a movie told a story, fragmenting the frame.  (Hard not think of Sam Peckinpah, of course, and hard to imagine John Woo without Peckinpah’s vocabulary to draw on.)  Butterfly is imitative, heated execution and undercooked ideas.  Not the worst thing, of itself, but it suffers by comparison.