Genre Analysis Of John Woo And Ramesh Sippy's Movies

Genre Analysis of John Woo & Ramesh Sippy’s Movies

Genre is like a language that used by directors and it encodes some important messages about movies. If you understand the genre, you can decode the movies and you can have more information about subtle realities are related with the films. In this article, I will explain the genre differences between John Woo and Ramesh Sippy movies.

John Woo is a Chinese director and he grew up in Hong Kong. He also directed important movies in Hollywood (IMDb). I will evaluate his three movies according to mix genre. These movies are Bullet in the Head (1990), Hard Boiled (1992) and The Killer (1989). When we evaluate these three films, we can see

When we compare all these three movies, Bullet in the Head has more concern about social problems because it indicates Vietnam War and its consequences. For example, it criticizes militarism because in the movie soldiers (especially non-Americans or Vietnamese) kill people without any reason and violate them. The most crucial scene about the corruption in the system is robbery scene because when two friends burgled the jeweler, military forces came and gather gold from jewelry. Then, kill the owner and moved on. Therefore, this scene is a big reflector for the society and corruption. Also, in Hard Boiled, one of the main characters says that everything ends except war. Moreover, the movies includes harsh justice criticism because event the protagonist is a policeman, he does not obey the authority and he defends that killing a person for revenge will secure the justice. For example, authorities criticized the policeman in The Killer for that. Nevertheless he killed the antagonist at the end of the movie and got his revenge. Although the movies have these kinds of social realism indicators, we cannot say that the movie is a realistic movie because exaggerating fight scenes and cinematographic regulations point out

The most obvious example of romantic drama is The Killer because the hero and blind singer fell in love each other. Thus, this love creates bigger problems and the hero is killed when he tries to save her life. However, this time he could not make it and the romance turns to drama. Other two movies also include love but they are not explicit as The Killer because other heroes try to save their wife or girls friends but they do not have a trouble with that and love is kept in the background. Another soft subgenre is comedy because comedy factors are available in the movies. However, comedy is not the main focus on the movies because there are some funny moments or dialogs between characters. For example, Hard Boiled is more suitable for containing comedy because the two policemen (one of them protagonist and other is uncovered) have funny arguments and the alliances between hero and his girl friend make funnier the movie. In addition, some parts of Sholay, contains comedy elements due to the two friends’ relationship and prison scenes but then it turns to drama and action