October 10 sees the release of Wong Kar-wai's ASHES OF TIME REDUX, his re-working of his 1994 martial arts mood piece, ASHES OF TIME. It's a remarkable movie and REDUX is definitely worth seeing, but there was something in Armond White's review of the film for the New York Press that stuck in my craw. White regards himself as a film critic unafraid to tell the truth, a contrarian who prides himself on saying that the King is naked. And yet, here he is in his review singing along to received critical wisdom about the role of action in movies.

In his review of ASHES OF TIME REDUX White repeats received wisdom when he writes, "Wong and Doyle abstract the martial arts genre into poetry and emotion beyond simplistic CROUCHING TIGER storytelling. The fighting is kitsch, but the longing and weeping are rich and real. Its story about a blind lovelorn mercenary ironically poeticizes vision and memory."

Critics have long felt that somehow the martial arts or action genre needed to be changed, elevated, abstracted in order to be considered "real art." White isn't entirely to blame for his misperception, he's merely toeing the critical line here, mouthing stale attitudes that are pretty common among film writers. Somehow action in movies is looked at with suspicion, whereas "longing and weeping" are considered "rich and real." Somehow, people pretending to have emotions onscreen has been privileged over physical performance. Fans are somewhat to blame for this with their fetishistic insistence on "no wires!" and "real" stunts, and their dismissal of performers viewed as "faking" their action. But all action choreography is faked, it's a combination of physical skill, filmmaking ability and technical know-how and the fascination shouldn't be with how it was done but with the cumulative effect.

Action filmmaking is like watching a great magician: you don't want to know how they created the effect, that's not the point, because the effect is everything. Maybe it's because action movies are so poorly made in Hollywood these days that action is dismissed as less meaningful than emotion, that physical performance is regarded as less than psychological performance, but somehow critics are suspicious of the joys of physicality onscreen while they wear their love of the psychological on their sleeves.

Physical performance is an essential - I would argue THE essential - part of true cinema. Buster Keaton is one of the world's greatest filmmakers and he built his career by developing ever more sophisticated ways to showcase his physicality in his movies. In his own way, Jacques Tati did the same thing, building movies that are no more and no less than the physical performance. Bruce Lee was not a great verbal or psychological actor, but the grace and power he brought to the screen was not some kind of chop sockey grindhouse guilty pleasure, it was a call for revolutionary awakening, a re-definition of what a Chinese man could be. When Jackie Chan takes on a hundred hitmen in a teahouse in DRUNKEN MASTER 2, or a speeding bus full of thugs in POLICE STORY or an entire warehouse of drug dealers in DRAGONS FOREVER the contrived storyline becomes secondary to the amazing things he does. Chan's physicality is an affirmation of human potential and audiences never get tired of seeing him show what anyone can do if they put their minds to it, that there are no odds we can't overcome. These are visceral lessons, emotional effects provoked by action that can't effectively be broken down into words. Sammo Hung's agility in ENCOUNTERS OF THE SPOOKY KIND or THE VICTIM are ten-thousand word essays in grace as he pulls off incredible feats that belie his bulky body.

If you enjoy the way classical ballet dancers seem to be exempted from the laws of gravity that the rest of us labor under every day, then how can you not enjoy the way Michelle Yeoh or Jet Li seem to be granted a reprieve from physics to run up walls? Tsui Hark's ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA series owes half of its success to the story and the filmmaking but it owes the other half to Jet Li and his physicalizing of folk hero Wong Fei-hung. His performance was so confident, so self-assured, that you could believe that he was who he said he was. He sold the idea of Wong Fei-hung with his body and what it appeared, convincingly, to do.

What I'm trying to say is that in a lot of movies the physicality, the action, the fighting, is the point of the film, not a useless garnish put in to appeal to the masses while the classes can ponder the subtext. For many Hong Kong movies, the actions are the emotions. The brutality of the action in Tsui Hark's THE BLADE, the physical bond between childhood friends Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao and Jackie Chan in DRAGONS FOREVER and even the fight choreography in ASHES OF TIME - these movies cannot exist without the action. It isn't a kitsch distraction as White maintains, it's the point. The story of Tony Leung's blind swordsman is just hot air without his big battle with the bandits. He does more physically in that sequence that he did in the rest of the movie, and his physicality comes off as honest, real and earned. Previously, he just talked up a storm about the insane odds he faced in his life, but in this action scene the sheer bravado required to face down those odds is made literal and heart-breaking.

Plot, character, dialogue and subtext are important parts of the moviegoing experience, but there's another more primal language that's harder to parse and that's the language of action. Action isn't seeking to appeal to your brain, it wants to go straight to your heart, directly to your gut. Just because it provokes bouncing up and down and cheering or grimaces of sympathetic pain rather than stroked goattees and thoughtful essays doesn't make it any less an essential aspect of moviegoing. In fact, it's an aspect that's been largely forgotten in Hollywood, an aspect that needs to be rediscovered fast. White may praise the attitude of ASHES OF TIME, he may think its shots of actors mooning into the camera and mouthing lines about regret and longing, are the most important things onscreen, but if that's the case then he deserves our pity. Because the fighting in that movie isn't kitsch, it's at least half of the point. The actors fly in combat the way they don't in their lives, they move with a savage speed that belies their emotional paralysis. They are enormously skilled in one thing: hurting someone else, and ultimately themselves. But in the meantime their emotional lives have come unraveled. They are killing machines, beautiful destroyers, who become more powerful the more their emotions warp, bend, break and die. And so, as their battles become more epic, as their abilities become more supernatural, as their actions become more baroque, their hearts shrivel and shrink and die. And if Armond White can't see that...