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Hello, Mayberry. I'm going to try to do the short version of this story and focus on the request, but even the short version of this is going to be long, so thanks up top to anyone who even reads the whole thing 
If you don't know me, in addition to being a Sherdog mod, which means that I'm obviously rich and buff and bench way more than 275 and am just drowning in Internet mod groupie tail, I'm also a film professor and I publish academic writing on film. I'm currently writing a chapter for a collection on Michelle Yeoh. It's the second chapter that I'm writing on her. In the first chapter, I focused on Yeoh in isolation, so to speak; I explored her individual star persona as a powerful feminine/feminist fighting star. Blah blah blah. In this new chapter, I want to explore her in relation to other characters in her films. This idea is pretty much entirely so that I have an excuse to write about Royal Warriors, which rules if you haven't seen it. Aside from the action - which includes the greatest action scene on a plane in film history - my favorite part about Royal Warriors is the relationship between Yeoh and Hiroyuki Sanada...because it is NOT actually a relationship. It is even part of a love triangle between Yeoh, Sanada, and Michael Wong...except that it is NOT a love triangle.
I have noticed this phenomenon in action and martial arts movies in different guises. In short, I am fascinated by action and martial arts movies which choose NOT to foreground (or, more accurately, SHOEHORN IN) a romantic subplot amidst the action. In the Hollywood context, an obvious bad example of this is the Liam Neeson movie Unknown. I just rewatched it (as part of a big Neeson-athon) and I still think that it is one of his coolest non-Taken action movies, but I hated the choice to shove him and Diane Kruger together. It was so contrived and implausible. If anything, they should have gone deeper into his relationship with January Jones. The "happy ending" with the goofy vacation date thing was just awful. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the paradigm case of how you do this with no romance whatsoever is Predator. You have a group of soldiers on a mission who now have to deal with an alien monster hunting them in the jungle. Granted, they find Elpidia Carrillo, but how dumb would it have been if John McTiernan had tried to build a love story between her and Arnold? They had enough on their plate getting to da choppa.
Most intriguing in the Hollywood action context is Aliens. This and Royal Warriors are my favorite examples of what I like to think of as "non-love stories." I am not sure what else to call them. They are not ANTI-love stories, but they are also not ACTUAL love stories. They occur in films where there is no time for a love story to truly blossom. In Aliens, Michael Biehn checks Sigourney Weaver out as soon as they wake up on the ship, and he catches her eye, too...but there is the issue of a whole planet of aliens trying to kill them. They are never able to have a true courtship, and yet there are wonderful moments like when he shows her how to use the sci-fi weaponry (which plays like a first date) and when they exchange first names (which has as much weight as if they had finally boned).
This is what I love in Royal Warriors. Sanada catches Yeoh's eye right away, and there are clearly sparks there, but first the guy's married with a kid, so she is not going to play homewrecker, and then when the wife and kid get killed (spoilers, I know, but it came out in 1986, so it's your fault if you haven't seen it already) she is not going to jump his bones. The timing is never right, but the emotions are there, and it adds such a great dynamic to the film. Yeoh played this sort of character more than once, a character who has feelings for someone that, for whatever reason(s), she cannot act on, or at least cannot act on the way that she would like. Royal Warriors and The Heroic Trio are the freshest in my mind, while I need to rewatch Tai Chi Master, The Stunt Woman, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to see the specifics of how she relates to Jet Li, Sammo Hung, and Chow Yun-fat.
My larger point, though, and the way that I will frame my chapter, is that this is not unique to Yeoh. That said, I am just one movie nerd sitting around trying to come up with more examples. I need my fellow Mayberry movie nerds to help me with more examples like Aliens and Royal Warriors. I don't need more movies like Predator, where there just is no love story, and not movies like The Way of the Dragon, where Nora Miao seems at times to want more with Bruce Lee while he is largely oblivious. I am looking for movies where there is clearly something there between two characters that they both register but do not do anything about.
Beyond Yeoh's films, which I will obviously already be rewatching and considering in detail, I can think of Rumble in the Bronx maybe, but I need to rewatch it and check the relationship between Jackie Chan and Françoise Yip; Kiss of the Dragon definitely, with Jet Li and Bridget Fonda, which importantly contributes to Li's "good guy" character from his time as Wong Fei-hung (whose relationship with Aunt Thirteen in the Once Upon a Time in China films also seems fitting); Exit Wounds, with the great dynamic between Steven Seagal and Jill Hennessy (which is full of sexual tension as opposed to the entirely platonic relationship between Seagal and Joan Chen in On Deadly Ground); even old school Westerns like Shane and The Searchers, where the cowboy heroes are motivated by love for married women that they can never act on. But I know that there have to be more examples.
What do you say, Mayberry? @europe1, @HenryFlower, @moreorless87, @Dragonlordxxxxx, what say you? You know any other movies that fit this bill?
Thanks in advance, Mayberrians.
If you don't know me, in addition to being a Sherdog mod, which means that I'm obviously rich and buff and bench way more than 275 and am just drowning in Internet mod groupie tail, I'm also a film professor and I publish academic writing on film. I'm currently writing a chapter for a collection on Michelle Yeoh. It's the second chapter that I'm writing on her. In the first chapter, I focused on Yeoh in isolation, so to speak; I explored her individual star persona as a powerful feminine/feminist fighting star. Blah blah blah. In this new chapter, I want to explore her in relation to other characters in her films. This idea is pretty much entirely so that I have an excuse to write about Royal Warriors, which rules if you haven't seen it. Aside from the action - which includes the greatest action scene on a plane in film history - my favorite part about Royal Warriors is the relationship between Yeoh and Hiroyuki Sanada...because it is NOT actually a relationship. It is even part of a love triangle between Yeoh, Sanada, and Michael Wong...except that it is NOT a love triangle.
I have noticed this phenomenon in action and martial arts movies in different guises. In short, I am fascinated by action and martial arts movies which choose NOT to foreground (or, more accurately, SHOEHORN IN) a romantic subplot amidst the action. In the Hollywood context, an obvious bad example of this is the Liam Neeson movie Unknown. I just rewatched it (as part of a big Neeson-athon) and I still think that it is one of his coolest non-Taken action movies, but I hated the choice to shove him and Diane Kruger together. It was so contrived and implausible. If anything, they should have gone deeper into his relationship with January Jones. The "happy ending" with the goofy vacation date thing was just awful. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the paradigm case of how you do this with no romance whatsoever is Predator. You have a group of soldiers on a mission who now have to deal with an alien monster hunting them in the jungle. Granted, they find Elpidia Carrillo, but how dumb would it have been if John McTiernan had tried to build a love story between her and Arnold? They had enough on their plate getting to da choppa.
Most intriguing in the Hollywood action context is Aliens. This and Royal Warriors are my favorite examples of what I like to think of as "non-love stories." I am not sure what else to call them. They are not ANTI-love stories, but they are also not ACTUAL love stories. They occur in films where there is no time for a love story to truly blossom. In Aliens, Michael Biehn checks Sigourney Weaver out as soon as they wake up on the ship, and he catches her eye, too...but there is the issue of a whole planet of aliens trying to kill them. They are never able to have a true courtship, and yet there are wonderful moments like when he shows her how to use the sci-fi weaponry (which plays like a first date) and when they exchange first names (which has as much weight as if they had finally boned).
This is what I love in Royal Warriors. Sanada catches Yeoh's eye right away, and there are clearly sparks there, but first the guy's married with a kid, so she is not going to play homewrecker, and then when the wife and kid get killed (spoilers, I know, but it came out in 1986, so it's your fault if you haven't seen it already) she is not going to jump his bones. The timing is never right, but the emotions are there, and it adds such a great dynamic to the film. Yeoh played this sort of character more than once, a character who has feelings for someone that, for whatever reason(s), she cannot act on, or at least cannot act on the way that she would like. Royal Warriors and The Heroic Trio are the freshest in my mind, while I need to rewatch Tai Chi Master, The Stunt Woman, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to see the specifics of how she relates to Jet Li, Sammo Hung, and Chow Yun-fat.
My larger point, though, and the way that I will frame my chapter, is that this is not unique to Yeoh. That said, I am just one movie nerd sitting around trying to come up with more examples. I need my fellow Mayberry movie nerds to help me with more examples like Aliens and Royal Warriors. I don't need more movies like Predator, where there just is no love story, and not movies like The Way of the Dragon, where Nora Miao seems at times to want more with Bruce Lee while he is largely oblivious. I am looking for movies where there is clearly something there between two characters that they both register but do not do anything about.
Beyond Yeoh's films, which I will obviously already be rewatching and considering in detail, I can think of Rumble in the Bronx maybe, but I need to rewatch it and check the relationship between Jackie Chan and Françoise Yip; Kiss of the Dragon definitely, with Jet Li and Bridget Fonda, which importantly contributes to Li's "good guy" character from his time as Wong Fei-hung (whose relationship with Aunt Thirteen in the Once Upon a Time in China films also seems fitting); Exit Wounds, with the great dynamic between Steven Seagal and Jill Hennessy (which is full of sexual tension as opposed to the entirely platonic relationship between Seagal and Joan Chen in On Deadly Ground); even old school Westerns like Shane and The Searchers, where the cowboy heroes are motivated by love for married women that they can never act on. But I know that there have to be more examples.
What do you say, Mayberry? @europe1, @HenryFlower, @moreorless87, @Dragonlordxxxxx, what say you? You know any other movies that fit this bill?
Thanks in advance, Mayberrians.
