Matinee icon.

Chow Yun-Fat moves through a film like a time-traveler from the cinematic past. A violent apparition materializing from the shadows of memory, the Hong Kong star who made his Hollywood debut in The Replacement Killers and is slated to appear next in producer Oliver Stone's upcoming The Corruptor imbues action with tenderness and regret, having one foot securely in the stoic moral codes of Only Angels Have Wings and the other in the weltschmerz of Wings of Desire. As an actor, Chow balances the innate and serf-conscious with a special sort of bemused intensity, reconciling the emblematic qualities of Bogart and Belmondo, Mitchum and Delon: both as embodiment of laconic movie mystique and meditation on its limits.

When Chow first teamed with director John Woo on 1986's A Better Tomorrow, they not only resurrected their own faltering careers but helped reinvent Hong Kong as the capital of pulp-art cinema - transforming "delirious" from adjective into aesthetic. Here was as perfect a marriage of actor and director as could be imagined, Chow's mixture of wry charm and doom-struck glamour serving as the ideal (and idealized) projection of Woo's romantic-nihilist sensibility. Which is apt, for their collaborations at once fetishize and eulogize male-bonding: presenting a movie-myth universe where killer and cop will inevitably discover they are blood brothers, secret sharers. In these slow-motion pictures, Chow connects emotionally only with other men; women hardly exist, save as innocents caught in the cross-fire. The Killer(1989) has at the center of its world a beautiful ruined church, where screen violence is transfigured into an amour fou ritual of mortification and failed atonement. in that monastery, Chow communes with the souls of the celluloid dead - Melville's Le Samourai and Peckinpah's The Killer Elite - while both harking back to Scorsese's gangster-Catholicism and anticipating Buddhist rites to come: Chow's saintly assassin is truly a monk with guns.

The actor's inevitable Americanization has been a long time coming - the biggest surprise was that it took so long. The Replacement Killers, which otherwise recycles Woo motifs as nakedly as its title indicates, narrows Chow's persona to a monosyllabic drone a la Eastwood and jettisons the madly homoerotic dynamics. (One reason it isn't an outright remake of The Killer is the fear US audiences wouldn't accept such a male soulmate relationship - where holding pistols to each other's heads becomes the equivalent of dancing cheek-to-cheek.) "Pure junk," sniffed a typically disdainful reviewer, yet in the finest B-movie tradition, director Antoine Fuqua turned generic liabilities into assets; as an exercise in iconic abstraction and stylized displacement, it equaled Woo protege Patrick Leung's entrancingly blank Beyond Hypothermia (Chow's costar Mira Sorvino might be auditioning for the role of Hypothermia's cold-blooded hitwoman who falls for a noodle vendor and gets them both killed). Indeed, contrasted with Woo's often bloated and self-canceling Face/Off, The Replacement Killers has a fast, precise concision: action sequences that explode like formalist hand grenades, set off by claustrophobic spaces reeking of Chandleresque rot, all held together by Chow's spectral gravity. In one scene he peers so deeply into a family photograph that he all but merges with its grainy figures.

There are a slew of Hollywood projects in Chow's future (he maintains he won't make any more movies in Hong Kong); besides the Stone project, there's a buddy-action comedy, a potential reunion with Woo, and maybe a remake of Anna and the King of Siam to costar Emma Thompson. Any of which may make him a star in America, but the real question is whether he'll wind up merely a conventional one. His best performances aren't complex, but the pleasure they give is - personifying Hong Kong's eloquent-primitive hybrid of familiarity and dislocation, the ascetic and the excessive. It's too bad his farewell to HK cinema, 1995's The Peace Hotel, has yet to find proper US distribution. But this is just the kind of polyglot, expectation-twisting movie that critics nowadays find as confounding as the general public (how would you sell people on the Preston Sturges version of Unforgiven or a Coen brothers retelling of Kundun?). Thus The Peace Hotel projects the "Killer" mythos backward onto an endless, sepia-tinged plain of movie yesterdays. The effect is of a mournful hilarity that slowly rises to ironic grandeur. It stands as apotheosis and commentary on the cinema-as-religion founded by Woo (the film's producer) and Chow (whose character isn't a savior but a self-exiled holy ghost), where reality dreams of its own transcendence like the Modigliani silhouette Chow mimicked in Once a ThieF: the screen image that aspires to become immortal, then die.

Howard Hampton is a contributor to Film Comment.