Experts in Action: Transnational Hong Kong–Style Stunt Work and Performance by Lauren Steimer (review)

Chief among the many appeals of Quentin Tarantino's 2019 alternative history fable, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is the film's centering of a stuntman. "You're too pretty to be a stuntman," snarks the movie's cartoonishly bombastic Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) of the protagonist, played by Brad Pitt. In a typically Tarantino-ish mélange of film nerd and fan boy humor, the line reminds us that stunt workers, by definition, are never stars.

By contrast, Lauren Steimer's new book, Experts in Action: Transnational Hong Kong–Style Stunt Work and Performance, is a scholarly exploration of the underlying premise that Tarantino (who is a recurring reference throughout her book) presents with such cheek. Situated between cinema and performance studies, and contributing to production culture, fan, and media industry studies, Steimer's work shines a spotlight on the "stunting stars" whose physical feats are a main attraction of contemporary action-centered film and television.¹ Her specific interest is in how Hong Kong cinema's transnational influence has offered industrial and professional opportunities that might not otherwise have been possible outside of Hollywood. Through case studies that include Thai action stars Tony Jaa and Jeeja Yanin, the international production of popular television series Xena: Warrior Princess (syndication, 1995–2001), and celebrated stunt doubles and action choreographers such as Dayna Grant, Chad Stahelski, and Zoë Bell, Steimer shows how global media and entertainment have assimilated Hong Kong production practices such as frontal performance, uncut action sequences, and a full-time second unit that enjoys a high degree of independent agency.² These developments are part of the longer transnational flow of labor that has empowered Hollywood since the mid-1990s and whose effects have irrevocably transformed the look and feel of global media. Steimer analyzes the flexible, diffuse, truly global media landscape of the first decades of the twenty-first century, which scarcely resembles the unilateral, predominately transatlantic poaching of Anglo-European talent that enabled US global media dominance throughout the twentieth century. As Steimer puts it, adapting a phrase originally used by Xena director Doug Lefler to describe how he intentionally borrowed from Hong Kong action and production practice, Hong Kong is now a "reservoir of technique" whose impact on global media exceeds mainstream Hollywood cinema, spilling out from movies to television, documentary, and other content heavily influenced by fan fiction. This ripple effect is geographic as well as transmedial: while Hollywood lifts, in typically unabashed fashion, from Hong Kong, Hong Kong's global influence is further augmented by its Hollywood aura, fostering lateral connections with other non-Hollywood production sites—such as New Zealand—that benefit from their proximity to Hong Kong.³

Students and scholars of Hong Kong cinema, global media, performance, and industry studies will find much of value in Experts in Action. As a behind-the-scenes look into the specialized labor of contemporary stunts and physical performance, Steimer's book offers a fascinating glimpse into how the human spectacle of modern action cinema straddles both cutting-edge motion capture technologies and low-tech paraphernalia such as cardboard boxes to break falls. The book opens with a sustained discussion of practice theory and the scholarship on expertise, including Malcolm Gladwell's wellknown and oft-cited assertion of 10,000 hours as the minimum training time necessary to achieve mastery in any discipline. As example and model of such expertise, Steimer cites Jackie Chan's Peking opera training and Hong Kong stunt crew, whose influence and standard is evident throughout all the other performers and choreographers studied in Steimer's subsequent chapters.⁴ This paradigm of expert performance frames Steimer's overall goal of according attention and due credit to individual performers, action choreographers, and the "collective effort necessary to produce phenomenal body effects."⁵ As Steimer wryly notes, "while, in the course of my research, I...