Hard Boiled

Hard Boiled is a masterpiece of the heroic bloodshed genre which is closely associated with the choreographer of bloody ballet, John Woo. By 1992, he had already established himself as one of the leading genre directors and had experienced varying degrees of success, from major box-office hits (A Better Tomorrow) to more modest successes (The Killer) and commercial disappointments (Bullet in the Head). Hard Boiled represented a crucial turning point in his career, having been completed shortly before he left for Hollywood to test his signature style within the studio system. And the farewell was, indeed, spectacular.

The police story about an inspector nicknamed Tequila (Chow Yun-fat) is packed with so much action that other filmmakers could use it to make twenty different feature films. Hard Boiled is the culmination of John Woo’s stylized action dance, a showcase of perhaps the most complex choreographed action scenes in the history of Hong Kong cinema and beyond, and a masterclass in film style. Each action sequence, however effective, is overshadowed by the next. The camera waltzes around hundreds of bodies gradually piling up, and at the centre of it all stands the charismatic duo of Chow Yun-fat and Tony Leung Chiu-wai.

A Better Tomorrow and Hard Boiled frame an era in Woo’s career, perhaps the most innovative, cinephilic, and cinematically daring. They represent the beginning and the endpoint of his Hong Kong gangster film period, which earned a permanent place in the history of action cinema.