login/register

Criticized for unnecessary violence, Inspector Yuen continues his investigations into the sales and smuggling of guns. Tony is a hired killer and the right hand man of Hoi, the head of the criminal consortium. He has a single rival, Johnny, who plans to double-cross Hoi in a gun deal.

Still stands up as one of the greatest action films ever made, this is John Woo at his peak ably supported by two of the best actors around, Chow Yun Fat and Tony Leung. It is their partnership that elevates this from a great action movie into a great movie period. They are too good of actors to let the only thing that makes an impression on you, be the bombs and bullets. You give a damn about the characters as well.

The plot? Well, it concerns gangsters, cops and cops who are playing at gangsters and vice versa. Thats not overly important, just sit back and prepare to be blown away.

Woo also has a nicely judged sense of morality amongst the carnage as well and this is the finest work he has ever produced and probably will ever do considering how he has disappointed (relatively speaking) since his move to Hollywood.

Released in 1992, Hard Boiled is John Woo's farewell to the kind of blood-spattered cinema of vengeance and redemption with which he had made his name as a director in Hong Kong during the late 1980s. The following year he was in Hollywood filming Hard Target with Jean-Claude Van Damme, and an era had effectively ended. This might explain the elegiac feel Woo brings to his study of two men haunted by the violent consequences of their actions. Chow Yun Fat generates tremendous sullen energy in his portrayal of Tequila, a plain-clothes cop who not only loses his partner in a shoot-out with a gang of underground gunrunners but also discovers that he's unwittingly killed a fellow officer working undercover. Playing opposite him is Tony Leung as the enigmatic Tony, a young police officer who has secretly managed to penetrate the world of illegal arms-dealing in the guise of a cold-blooded gangland assassin. With rival gangs fighting over the weapons trade and Tequila gunning for Tony, unaware of his true identity, Hard Boiled has an unsurprisingly high body count, particularly when the various factions converge on a private hospital, reducing it by the movie's end to a smoking war zone, its corridors strewn with corpses.

John Woo's ability to exploit the comic-book profundities of the genre, endowing his set-piece action sequences with a uniquely emotional edge, comes through in the controlled use of slow motion, cut-away details and brooding freeze-frame studies of the central characters. The image of Chow Yun Fat cradling an abandoned baby against his chest while he blasts his way out of the hospital's maternity unit has an enduring sharpness to it. However, a sense of ending runs throughout the movie, as if Woo were acknowledging that, having done everything he could with the format, the time had come for him to move on. And perhaps it had. --Ken Hollings

	Enter your search terms Submit search form
	Web www.filmcritique.co.uk