Hard Boiled (1992)
Movie rating: 8/10
If you’re looking for pure action and scenes of guys shooting each other, Hard Boiled has it in spades. Here is John Woo’s last Hong Kong film before his move to Hollywood that produced action classics like Face/Off (I’m also something of a Mission: Impossible 2 apologist). Woo’s style set the standard for ’90s action cinema. It’s a cliché at this point to compare his action scenes to ballet, but still true. If ballets tell a story through dance, Woo does the same with wildly excessive gunfights, which laid the foundations for the gun fu style.
The plot of Hard Boiled is almost beside the point. Inspector “Tequila” Yuen Ho-yan (Chow Yun-fat) is your standard grizzled, hard-drinking movie cop—albeit with a penchant for playing the clarinet—who plays by his own rules but gets results. Tequila sees his partner killed in a shootout with gun smugglers and seeks revenge. Meanwhile, Alan (Tony Leung) is an undercover cop infiltrating the involved triad gangs. He and Yuen eventually cross paths and seek to take down the gangs.
The first half of the movie is fine. There are two major action sequences, one in a teahouse and the other in a warehouse, that are executed with flair and fun to watch. Woo loves two kinds of shots in particular: 1) guys flying through the air firing guns, and 2) guys getting shot repeatedly. My favourite scene involves Chow sliding down a railing firing two guns at once. Possibly no one this side of Zack Snyder is as fond of slow-motion as Woo, and no action director devotes as much screen time to guys getting shot. Where other directors will film actors getting hit once and going down, Woo loves to film them taking multiple shots. It’s all very excessive, but up until the second hour nothing that felt transcendent.
The climax, on the other hand, is something else. The last 45 minutes or so take place in a hospital and represent flat-out one of the most thrilling extended action sequences I’ve ever seen, all but discarding any concern for plot (Tequila’s partner stopped being mentioned a while ago). The shootings and explosions are nearly constant, along with guys leaping through the air and crashing through windows. While earlier action scenes were effective enough, the hospital setting presents a threat to doctors and patients that massively ratchets up the tension. The most ingenious part involves efforts to rescue babies from a maternity ward and get them out of the building amid all the gunfire and explosions. Introducing vulnerable infants into all this chaos raises the stakes even more than your typical damsel in distress.
We get plenty of Woo’s trademark standoffs, some decent humour, and a fun dynamic between Tequila and Alan who in true buddy cop fashion clash at first before learning to respect each other. Like most action movies that revolve around police, Hard Boiled is total copaganda. Apparently Woo had received criticism for glamorizing gangsters in his previous films, and so intentionally set out to make a film that glamorizes police. At least he’s upfront about it. Glorification of cops is such a common trope in action films that it’s almost unfair to single out this particular film.
Not much else to say about the movie, really. It’s a standard cops vs. gangsters action movie, but with such excessive over-the-top action that it raised the bar for the entire genre. Woo took movie gunfights and turned them up to 11, and the results are wildly entertaining for any action fan.