Men of Action: Hard Boiled (Dir John Woo, 2h 8m, 1992)

We're in a tea house in Hong Kong. Our hero, the appropriately named, and suitably tough, hardboiled cop, nicknamed Tequila (the already legendary Chow Yun-fat, star of countless action and drama films in the region and beyond), together with his partner, Benny, are on stake out, against a gang of gun smugglers, who we, and they, find mid-deal. Without warning, as the tension of the scene rises, birdsong mixed in with the ambient score, another gang arrive on the scene, and what follows will absolutely revolutionise cinema. A tea kettle slams through scene-and all hell breaks loose, Tequila breaking open on the birdcages to reveal guns, before, in the director's characteristic style, guns fire from seemingly every angle, people crash, leap, duck-dive, and race through shot, expending incredible amounts of ammunition at each other. Time becomes, in a word, flexible, slow-motion appearing and disappearing as the moment requires. Bullets tear through scenery, through people, through feathers. By the end of the scene, the bodycount is soaring, Benny is dead, Tequila is no closer to catching the mastermind behind the gun running operational, and John Woo is just getting started.

John. Woo. Few directors are as synonomous with action, with over-the-top gun and kung-fu, with a slick, stylish turn, few directors have such an unmistakable style as John Woo. Sure, it's a style long since absorbed into cinema, through the Matrix Trilogy, the films of Quentin Tarantino that magpie thieve from his action scenes, and myriad other franchises that lift, homage, or outright steal from his school or style, a kinetic, wildly over the top take on action cinema that practically reinvented the medium when Hollywood finally came into contact with it. It's not for nothing that Woo is often called the father of the modern action movie, and no film in his ouvre captures the master of action at the height of his powers than Hard Boiled, the tale of a cop, a mole inside the criminal organization that he's trying to take down, and the absolute chaos that threatens to engulf all of Hong Kong, as they go up against a criminal triad and their nefarious weapons smuggling operation in a taut, if often explosively violent action masterclass.

What defines Hard Boiled is its action, and here, let us briefly discuss Hong Kong action as a whole-birthed from the fists of Lee, and honed in the 1980s by his two great successors, Jackie Chan, who took the medium in a more comedic and stunt-driven sense-in a way, harking back to the works of early cinema, and Jet Li, whose more grounded action movie chops took the medium west, so the medium grew in popularity, culminating with Chan's Police Story and Li's Once Upon a Time in China. By this point, though, another film, 1989's The Killer, directed by Woo, had broken into the West, its tale of an assassin carrying out one more hit to rescue the sight of a woman he wounded, then falls in love with capturing several of Woo's directoral trademarks, from its focus upon Hong Kong's criminal underworld to its use of wire-aided gun-fu, a balletic, hyperviolent style of action that combines martial arts and gunfights, and its use of heroic bloodshed, a-at this point, at least-uniquely Hong Kong cinematic genre where themes of loyalty and brotherhood run hand-in-hand with violence and redemption.

The Killer does two things. Firstly, its limited release,  but unmitigated success opens the eyes of a whole generation of film-makers in the States to a whole new way of shooting action, from Tarantino and Rodriguez to the Wachowskis and Luc Besson. This interest, of course, would eventually lead to not just Woo, but many of the stars, choreographers, and stunt performers heading west as the boom in Hong Kong action rolled over North America, leading to both Li and Chow Yun-Fat, together with Chan, becoming decently bankable stars in the West, and Woo going on to make sublimely over-the-top movies like Face/Off (1997), and the enjoyable, if workmanlike, Mission Impossible II (2000), before returning back to Hong Kong, to make films for the Chinese market, beginning with the spectacularly scaled Red Cliff (2008-2009). We're getting ahead of ourselves, for, before heading off to the West, Woo's final film for his native audience is, undoubtedly, his best.

Back to the action. For Woo uses action like few other directors-it might be easy to regard Tequila as a caricature of the rogue cop, chainsmoking, frequenting a bar where Woo himself offers his hero advice, and picking fights with his superior, but through the action that Woo places Chow in, we see far more of his character than in the scenes in-between-that opening sequence isn't just to give the audience a thrill, it's a perfect portrait of a protagonist whose view of justice often wins out over logic. Later in the film, after all, we see him go in single-handedly against an entire triad, whilst the film's climatic shootout sees him wield not a precise handgun or semi-automatic but the brute force of a shotgun. This is not a man who minces words, even before the rows with his boss, Pang. Yet, the film is keen, compared to the obvious comparisons with Eastwood's Dirty Harry, to flesh him out further, from his clear care for his girlfriend, Teresa (Teresa Mo), to his love of jazz music and playing of the clarinet, to his care for his informant, Foxy, after the latter is wounded in his escape from the triads.

Much of Tequila is, undeniably, heroic-far from the morally grey to openly flawed figures of Woo's previous films, in where the heroic bloodshed stock ending of our anti-hero either dead or humbled, Tequila is a heroic cop, a tough, resourceful figure, who gets the lion's share of the heroic moments, from his rescue of an infant that he battles through the hospital with, to his trick-shot to get them out of a locked corridor, to his overall tough, but warm demeanour. This this may be a film that leans more into the light than the dark, due to critques of his films glamourising gangsters leading to him focusing upon the police, but it's one that is just as keen to make their hero tough, but identifiable.

Against Tequila, the film places the Woo anti-hero writ large. Alan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) is not just the inverse of Tequila, the clean-cut, methodical gangster against the wild, and often unpredicatable cop, but perhaps the best single character in Woo's entire filmography, a cop so far undercover that he begins to question his own identity, a nuanced figure who seems to mourn those men who he puts to the gun, making each a paper crane, but whose skill with a gun, from his introduction, executing a former gangster in a library, indicates a man without peer. We see him move from hired gun for the kindly, if clearly out-of-his-depth Uncle Hoi, to the hired hitman of the film's true villain, Johnny Wong (Anthony Wong), an enjoyably nasty and cowardly figure who threatens and belittles his enemies, but barely ever raises a gun himself, using his men, including the scene-stealing Mad Dog (legendary Hong Kong stuntman, Philip Kwok), to do his dirty work

Hard Boiled, though, is a film for which character-and, bluntly, plot-is a means to an end-it has great moments of character-the messages from Alan to Pang take the form of musical phrases brought via flowers to Teresa, whilst the showdown between Alan and Tequila aboard Alan's boat is as once a tense scene, and a perfect bit of character development. Certainly, the film never lets a moment of emotion, of tension-the moment in the lift between floors is practically a microdrama, Alan believing he has shot a fellow policeman in the confusion, whilst Tequila tries to calm him down, to convince him what he's seen is not the case, before they leap back into action. For every little moment of character development, from the lighter that passes between characters, as gift and protection to clue, to the book that conceals the gun Alan uses for his hit-every single little piece of this film, up to the infant that Tequila rescues at the film's climax, is in service to the film's action.

No film captures the Hong Kong action movie like Hardboiled does; it's effortless, yet breathtaking simply how much is going on in some of the denser action setpieces-the ambush on Uncle Hoi's men is a blisteringly nasty massacre where Johnny's gang storm in on bikes and in cars, machinegunning down swathes of men, blowing up their ammuntion stores, though which the impressively malign figure of Mad Dog strolls, dispensing chaos. That Woo's patent style never loses focus, even in this carnage, even as the sublime, the violent and the ridiculous rub shoulders, flip each other upside down and empty a clip of ammunition as they dive across the screen, is proof to the degree this visual spectacle was honed.

The hospital battle, meanwhile, might be the single greatest action setpiece of the 1990s, a near half hour masterclass of escalating action, beginning with our heroes, with Alan and Tequila now allying, uncovering the secret cache of weapons and soon the figure of Mad Dog who, in blunt terms, declares war on our heroes, eventually taking in the entire hospital complexes as Johnny's last stand turns increasingly desperate, the entire Hong Kong police department, as open war rages between them and Johnny's triad.It is a sequence so stuffed with great action moments that it's almost embarressing. Woo leaves us, not on the downbeat ending of heroic bloodshed, but victory, and the open seas of freedom, a flotilla of cranes bobbing across it.

Even with the dilution by western cinema in the decades since, Hard Boiled is a remarkable watershed moment in cinema. It is everywhere, the very lifeblood of action cinema as a genre-The Matrix's "Government Lobby" sequence is Woo's style thesis boiled down to four minutes of all-out chaos, Zack Snyder's undercranked vari-speed action scenes owe their all to western action movies, the brutal churn of The Raid duology various expansions upon the formula. But they can only be homages to the original-Woo's filmography after his Hollywood period have never quite captured the pure lightning in a bottle bullet strewn controlled chaos of Hard Boiled; it is an entire medium, an entire school of action cinema, and entire strain of action hero honed to absolute perfection, never to be captured again.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

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