Review: Hard Boiled

John Woo was going to Hollywood. The Hong Kong director who invented the heroic bloodshed genre and was responsible for such classics as The Killer and A Better Tomorrow was ready to move to the United States. For what he believed was his final movie in China he came up with something that he hoped would both be a huge thrill ride for his fans as well as a showcase to impress the American movie studios he had hoped to be working for. That movie, Hard Boiled, was basically a mish mash of every cliche formula Hollywood cop movie that had been released in the past three decades. A mixture of Dirty Harry, 48 Hours and Lethal Weapon. Somehow Woo was able to make the formula fresh and take it to a level that Hollywood never dared to.

The star of the movie is Chow Yun-Fat who plays Tequila, a tough as nails maverick cop who is out to get a gang of gun smugglers. The movie opens with an incredible shootout between Tequila and some of the gun runners at a tea house. There Tequila's partner is killed leaving him to go after the rest of the gang alone. Meanwhile another cop named Allen ( Toney Leung ) is deep undercover in the very gang that Tequila is after. Inevitably they both team up to stop the gang who has hidden their weapons cache in the basement of a hospital. when the police inevitably attempt to raid the hospital the end result is an all out gun battle that lasts a good 45 minutes. Here Woo is at his best, going over the top in what may have easily been his final Heroic Bloodshed movie. Most impressive is a five minute continuous shot where the camera follows Tequila and Allen through the hospital, onto an elevator, then on to another floor where they have a gunfight with even more thugs.

While this movie has none of the subtle melodrama that made The Killer and A Better Tomorrow memorable, it does have more than it's share of memorable set pieces. The opening gun battle at the tea house, another gun battle at a warehouse where Tequila single handed takes out a small army of armed thugs, and the final 45 minute gun battle between the police and the gun runners at the hospital, not to mention several shorter action scenes spaced out between to keep your attention. To top this off Woo ended the film with a bang. The bad guys have rigged the hospital with explosives and once their leader realizes that the police are about to overtake the hospital sets the explosives off, sending Tequila running through the corridors as the building literally blows up behind him. The hospital was actually the old Coca~Cola factory that had recently closed. Not only did Woo redress it as a hospital but blew up half the building in order to get the explosion effects at the end of the movie. ( A year later director Kirk Wong would blow up the other half of the Coke factory for his movie Crime Story )

Woo had deliberately chosen to set the end of the movie in a hospital to give the final battle extra tension. Here the police are forced to avoid fleeing patients, an advantage to the gang who does not care who they shoot. There is a maternity ward in the hospital filled with newborn babies and for much of the movie a swat team is force to rescue them while being shot at. The fleeing patients give actor Philip Kwok a moment to shine. Playing a thug named Mad Dog he spends much of the finale in a shootout with Allen until they both realize they are in the same room with cowering patients. Allen puts down his gun as does Mad Dog, both giving the patients time to limp out of harms way. A moment of honor between warriors. The role of Mad Dog gave Philip Kwok, who was in the Venom Mob a decade earlier in his days at Shaw Brothers Studios, one last memorable film role. The leader of the gun runners Johnny Wong ( Anthony Wong ) does not have such honor, and once he walks into the room and witnesses Mad Dog allowing the patients to walk away takes out a machine gun and mows them down. An underlying theme in the movie was the transition between the past generation of triads who still had their code of honor and the new generation represented by Wong who did not.

Hard Boiled remains one of the all time greatest action movies putting the Hollywood produced genre cop films made up to that point to shame. After it's release John Woo left for Hollywood, his first movie being Hard Target with Jean-Claud Van Damme. While Hard Target was a completely different story ( Van Damme uncovers an organization that arranges for rich men to hunt humans ) Woo was able to take many of the action scenes from Hard Boiled and transplant them into his American movie. This resulted in a NC17 rating and Universal cutting the movie so that it would get an R rating. A sequel to Hard Boiled called Stranglehold was made as a video game for the Playstation, the cut scenes and story being written and directed by John Woo and Tequila's voice being supplied by Chow-Yun Fat. Recently Woo has begun work on a script which would adapt the video game as a movie. No word yet on what the rating of that film would be.