Life Should be About Fun: Hard Boiled

Fade in on a backlit film noir image of tequila and soda pouring into a glass.  The drink is not shaken, not stirred, but slammed onto the bar. The violent mixologist downs it in one gulp, takes a drag off his cigarette, and brings a clarinet to his lips. Now that’s jazz.

In the history of action cinema, there is before and after John Woo. With the exception of Big Jim Cameron, no other modern filmmaker has made such a lasting imprint on the genre. Hard Boiled, Woo’s 24th (!) film, and his last effort in Hong Kong before heeding the siren call of Hollywood, is generally considered the one that broke the mold. (While his immediate follow-ups, the Hollywood b-flicks Hard Target and Broken Arrow, didn’t set the world on fire, he regained his footing with Hyperreal favorite Face/Off.)

Woo began his directing career in the 1970s, grinding out comedies and martial arts films for studios like Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest. Following a burnout break in the 1980s, Woo teamed up with super-producer Tsui Hark to make A Better Tomorrow, a revolutionary blockbuster that set the template for the “heroic bloodshed” subgenre of ultra-stylized, gritty yet emotional Hong Kong action flicks. With a bona fide game-changer under his belt, Woo was allowed to explore his own style with relative creative freedom, notching two more classics with A Better Tomorrow II and The Killer. 

Following this run of gangster films, Woo wanted to tell a story from the police’s perspective. For Hard Boiled, he re-teamed with his usual lead, superstar Chow Yun Fat, to create the character of “Tequila” Yuen. A variation on the Dirty Harry-style rebel bucking the system, Tequila is the type of cop who chews on a toothpick while smoking a cigarette at the same time, a characterization that would risk absurdity without Chow Yun Fat’s mesmerizing charisma and commitment to the bit.

Following the jazzy credit sequence, Hard Boiled opens with one of three massive action set pieces that on their own would elevate any other film into the stratosphere. Tequila and his partner lead a team of cops into a tea house to arrest a gang of arms dealers. In the ensuing mayhem, we are treated to a classic moment of gun fu in which Tequila slides down a staircase banister with both guns blazing.  

Later we are introduced to Alan, a deep-undercover cop who folds an origami bird every time he kills someone. Played by the iconic Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (In The Mood For Love), Alan is all surface calm covering hidden depths of emotion, in contrast to Tequila’s heart-on-sleeve theatrics and wisecracking. The characters’ trajectories begin to converge around a turf war between an aging triad kingpin and a nihilistic arms dealer played with sneering panache by Anthony Wong. Tequila and Alan finally come face to face during the second big set piece, a 20-minute clusterfuck set in a cavernous warehouse featuring motorcycles, explosions, dozens of death-tempting stunts, and approximately 10,000 bullet squibs.  

The big daddy of John Woo action scenes is the climactic showdown set in a hospital, which rages for over 30 minutes. The bad guys hold the entire building hostage, including a roomful of adorable newborn babies, apparently left over from a discarded subplot concerning a baby-killing psycho. (The gratuitousness of cute baby close-ups almost out-exploits the bloody shootouts.) The set piece features Woo’s best-known piece of cinema, a legendary tracking shot that follows our heroes as they shoot their way from one part of the hospital, into an elevator, and up to another floor.

Hard Boiled made enough of an impression to catapult John Woo to the A-list, but the filmmaker’s ultra-stylized visions of slow-motion chaos never looked better, with a grit and texture not found  in his slicker big-budget efforts. His signature themes of brotherhood and cop-criminal identity crises resonate long after the final gunshots ring out. Woo even cast himself as Tequila’s ex-cop buddy who bartends at the jazz club, and shines as a low-key character actor. One of the definitive films of the 90s, Hard Boiled manages to be epic yet intimate, dark and graphic yet light as a feather.  As Tequila declares during the film’s climax, “Life should be about fun.”  *throws grenade*