“Staff Picks” is a deeper look into movies that we love here at Video CULTure. Each edition of this column will focus on a single film that we think you should check out, either for the first time or for a long-overdue revisit.
By Patrick Bartlett (Twitter: @alleywaykrew)
I will never forget the first time I saw John Woo’s “Hard Boiled”. When I was growing up, there were tons of movies and filmmakers that I was interested in that I simply couldn’t get access to from the video stores in my small town. When the original, dvd-by-mail version of Netflix came to be, Asian cinema was one of the first things I tried to finally dip my toe into. At the top of that list was the work of John Woo. I started with “Hard Boiled” and I will always be so glad I did. Even though it’s essentially Woo’s farewell to Hong Kong before he came to the states, it is a grand finale and one of the best action films ever committed to celluloid. I vividly recall sitting in my room with my best friend and when things get underway in the opening teahouse shootout, my jaw literally dropped and hung agape for the entirety of the sequence. I was watching a movie that by that point was already relatively old and I had never seen anything like it. I really believe I still haven’t.
I can remember being aware of Woo from a pretty young age, so I was desperate to see his films. Sadly, my introduction to his work was his second American film, “Broken Arrow”. Yeah. I mean, sure, it’s fine…but I was fully expecting to have my mind blown. It was summarily not. I still checked out “Hard Target” and later “Face/Off” and even “Mission: Impossible 2” because I knew that John Woo was a god to my fellow movie geeks. There had to be something I was missing. At a certain point, I more or less gave up. That was until the advent of the original form of Netflix. The ability to see basically any movie released on DVD was practically a godsend. There was always a nagging need to see Woo’s Hong Kong work and I figured I’d finally either see what people had been losing their minds over or I would finally officially realize the man’s work just wasn’t for me. It was absolutely the former. Woo’s style has been ripped off endlessly for literal decades but no one has managed to capture what John Woo is capable of, especially here. I’ve heard Sam Raimi compare Woo’s mastery of action to Hitchcock’s mastery of suspense and I have no idea how to qualify that but I absolutely agree that “Hard Boiled” proves that Woo is an absolute master.
Woo lays out the movie in the way a lot of horror films are laid out in that you go big in your opening scene and you don’t need to thrill your audience like that again until the end. Which isn’t to say there aren’t other great action sequences but I’m completely serious when I say that when someone says “action film”, the first image that pops into my mind is Chow Yun Fat’s character of Tequila sliding down the banister while dual-wielding pistols, taking down bad guys and saving civilians… all while endlessly chewing on a toothpick. It’s seared into my brain and the legitimate dictionary definition of “action” as far as I’m concerned. I’d say you wonder how Woo could top such a sequence but if you’re anything like me, you spend the rest of the film completely in it. I am engrossed. I am transfixed. There is no future, only present. Granted, yes, Woo does miraculously manage to top the opening sequence with a third act that is essentially one giant action sequence inside of a hospital where I couldn’t even begin to describe all the things that happen without a lot of wild gesticulations (which you can’t see) and sentence fragments. You really just need to experience it for yourself.
The plot of the movie is fairly basic but I don’t know how to describe it without spoiling things a bit. If you want to watch the film and come back to this, I’d understand but trust me when I say that this is a film that is pretty much impossible to spoil because I guarantee you will be dazzled regardless. Anyway, having said that: the hero, Tequila, played by Chow Yun Fat is essentially a Chinese version of Dirty Harry… except he secretly wishes he was a jazz musician and not a badass cop. Go figure. Elsewhere, Alan, played by Tony Leung is working his way up in the organized crime world. When Alan and Tequila come head-to-head however… Alan has the chance to kill Tequila and doesn’t. It turns out that Alan is actually a cop as well. He’s deep undercover and doing everything in his power to protect himself and the case he’s working. I won’t spoil the whys and wherefores but at a certain point, Alan and Tequila team up in an attempt to take down Johnny Wong, a crime boss on the come-up. It all leads to the aforementioned third act hospital action extravaganza where obviously good guys kill bad guys and bad guys kill good guys. Unlike typical action films though, good guys kill good guys and bad guys kill bad guys also. There’s more pathos than you’d expect and definitely more than you generally get in an action film, especially compared to what was being made and released in the U.S. at the time.
I have heard it said recently that ’90s/2000s film geeks did a disservice to the next generation of film geeks by not talking enough about John Woo… specifically his work in Hong Kong. I absolutely agree. For a long time, it was just assumed that if you were a film geek, you loved John Woo. The problem with that is that it’s an unspoken thing. Being that there’s a large group of the film nerd population that is completely unaware that “Hard Boiled” or Woo’s other classics like “The Killer” or “A Better Tomorrow” exist, I really hope that turns around in the near future. I’m prepared to lead the charge if necessary. There’s hardly a day that goes by that I don’t think about images created by John Woo that are indelible. Granted, a pretty ubiquitous part of those images is the man who seemed to essentially be his muse and that was Chow Yun Fat. It’s a shame that Chow’s career in the U.S. didn’t go much better than Woo’s did. The man just defines cool, not just in this film but basically every time he and John Woo worked together and no one seemed to be able to capture his charisma quite the same way. Also, he didn’t work with Woo as much but Tony Leung is the one who does a lot of the dramatic heavy lifting here and he rises to the occasion with aplomb. I’ve seen people win major acting awards for pulling off less than Leung is able to here. It’s not like his character turning to crime is ever in question but you can see the scars on his soul in his eyes from everything he’s forced to do in the name of eventual justice. Truly powerful work and not talked about nearly enough when discussing this film.
I don’t know if I can ever feel like I’ve really said enough about “Hard Boiled” or its importance to me. I just hope people will watch it and it will have the same or a similar effect on them. It’s not necessarily simple to find on streaming but it’s much easier than it was to find when I was begging at the video store as a kid. It’s out there for you to enjoy. This is a landmark piece of work that not only are you still seeing echoes of today but it took literal decades for any filmmaker to catch up and innovate in the way that John Woo managed to. It’s truly a shame that he didn’t seem to ever completely break out in the American studio system but even with his work in the West not living up to what He was able to achieve in Hong Kong… his legacy is still cemented. As my friend said long after seeing this film and John Woo’s other work: “you haven’t lived until you’ve been wooed by Woo!”
To find out where this film is available to stream, click here: Just Watch