With The Last Stand (2013), director Kim Jee-woon makes a conditional success of a kind of film that defeated the Hong Kong directors in the mid-1990s: a big dumb action film with an intractable aging action star at the center. In this case, he's saddled with Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is admittedly a step up from Jean-Claude Van Damme, whose presence almost ruined the careers of John Woo, Ringo Lam, and Tsui Hark when they all made landfall in Hollywood two decades ago. It's also possible that the tightly controlled idiom of New Korean Cinema is less vulnerable to Hollywood derailment than the more freewheeling Hong Kong action films. Maybe.
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