Hard Boiled (1992)

Hard Boiled (1992)
Chinese Title: 辣手神探
Translation: Hot Hand Detective

 

Starring: Chow Yun-Fat, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, Teresa Mo Sun-Kwan, Phillip Chan Yan-Kin, Phillip Kwok Chun-Fung, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Kwan Hoi-San, Stephen Tung Wai, Bowie Lam Bo-Yi, Bobby Au-Yeung Tsan-Wah, Ng Shui-Ting
Director: John Woo
Action Director: Philip Kwok

 

Early fall – 1997. My sister, Carolyn, and I go to the dollar(-seventy-five) theater on the Miracle Mile (i.e. Pacific Avenue) in Stockton, California. The double-bill for this Satuday? Two action movies starring Nicolas Cage: Con Air and Face/Off. And yes, it was a totally ass-kicking evening for my sister and I. No if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. At the time, I was beginning to collect Jackie Chan movies and was familiar with John Woo thanks to Hard Target. Meanwhile, Carolyn knew John Woo (at least in concept) because of Broken Arrow, which she watched while she went through a Christian Slater crush phase. This was the 1990s, after all.

I was so impressed with the scale and quality of the action in Face/Off that I decided it was time to watch John Woo’s Chinese movies. It was funny, the name came to my attention when Hard Target came out four years earlier. His name was touted on the trailers and TV spots, even though I had no idea who he actually was. At about the same time, I noticed that the ’99 Drive-In (Stockton had a Drive-In theater way out on the south side that I never actually went to before it closed down) started showing some of John Woo’s earlier films. I saw that the Drive-In was showing some movie called “The Killer,” but instead of Jean-Claude Van Damme in the cast, there were a bunch of Chinese names I’d never heard of. I was 11 at the time.

There was a video store right behind UOP (University of the Pacific) located on the corner of Alpine and Pacific Avenues. It wasn’t one of our main video stores, but we had a membership there and occasionally stopped there to rent movies, especially after Alpine Video (also located on Alpine Avenue, but a few miles away on the other side of UOP) closed down. One evening in my early Sophomore year in high school I went there, scoured the Action-Adventure and Foreign Movies sections, and found A Better Tomorrow. I rented it and absolutely loved it. Excellent film all around.

Not too long afterward, we were at the Blockbuster Video on the corner of Pershing and Robinhood (right behind Delta college) and I saw that they had a John Woo movie called Hard Boiled. I immediately picked it up and put in on the pile for my mom to rent. I saw that it starred Chow Yun-Fat, who had been in A Better Tomorrow. Now, bear in mind that I’m still a Hong Kong neophyte at this point, with most of my experience coming from Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee. In Leonard Maltin’s review of A Better Tomorrow, he praised Chow’s performance as a mob enforcer. For some reason, I equated Chow with Soon Ji-Ho, Ti Lung’s character. So when I popped Hard Boiled into the VCR, I was expected to see an action movie starring a middle-aged man with a receding hairline. I quickly figured out that Chow Yun-Fat was not the main character from A Better Tomorrow, but rather, his best friend who gets a fat hole blown in his head during the climax. Oh, okay.

A brief opening introduces us to Chow Yun-Fat’s character, a cop referred to by his colleagues as “Tequila.” He’s playing jazz clarinet at a jazz bar (owned by a former cop played by the director himself) and we see that the drummer in his band is his partner, Lung (Bowie Lam, of Doctor Vampire and Most Wanted). Tequila’s clarinet solo is played to the backdrop of the seedier parts of Hong Kong and newspapers informing us about the general surge in gun violence and crime overall. It certainly sounds like the U.S.A. circa 2022, if you ask me.

We then switch to a teahouse where Tequila and Lung are to break up an arms deal. The guns—Chinese models--themselves are hidden in the birdcages that the bad guys have brought. It doesn’t take long before the cops—disguised as waiters and customers—step in and a huge gunfight breaks out. The firefight is made even more complicated by the fact that a) the criminals hold absolutely no regard for human life and b) there’s a third-party gunman (Japanese actor Jun Kunimura, of Godzilla Final Wars and Tomie: Forbidden Fruit) who opens fire on the cops of his own accord. By the time the smoke clears, all of the criminals are dead. Lung is also dead. And the mysterious gunman is dead. Unfortunately for Tequila, the latter was an undercover policeman working under the supervision of Tequila’s boss, Chief Pang (Phillip Chan, of Bloodsport and Double Impact).

“Give the man a gun, and he’s Superman. Give him two, and he’s God.” 

We then meet a new set of characters. The first is a hitman named Alan (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, of The Magic Crane and Seoul Raiders), who is in the employ of an older arms dealer named Uncle Hoi (Kwan Hoi-San, of the Project A films). Hoi’s major business rival is Johnny Wang (Untold Story’s Anthony Wong). Considering that this is early 90s Anthony Wong we’re talking about here, you can guess what kind of person Johnny Wang is: a complete and utter psychopath with (you guessed it) no regard for human life. In fact, it was his men who were involved in the teahouse incident. After Alan wastes one of Johnny’s new acquisitions—the hit is carried out in a surreal scene at a hospital—Johnny tries to woo Alan over to his side.

As this is happening, Tequila is mainly making himself a nuisance by harassing Johnny Wang in public (which almost gets him a bullet in his head for his troubles). However, when Johnny decides to put an end to Uncle Hoi’s hegemony in the market, Tequila gets word of it through his informant, Foxy (Stephen Tung Wai, of Once Upon a Time in China V). Johnny gives Alan a chance to prove his loyalty to him during a raid on Uncle Hoi’s warehouse, located in the deepest corners of the port. A huge three-way shootout (played in two parts) between Johnny’s killers, Uncle Hoi’s men, and one-man-army Tequila ensues, ending the lives of dozens of arms dealers. Tequila finds himself face to face with Alan at the end of the shootout. Although, Tequila is out of bullets, Alan is not. So, why doesn’t Alan kill him? Could it be that he’s an undercover cop, just like the one Tequila killed at the beginning?

Hard Boiled was John Woo’s last Hong Kong film before moving to Hollywood the following year. The handover of Hong Kong back to the People’s Republic of China was looming on the horizon and even with the Basic Law guaranteeing “business as usual,” nobody knew what was going to happen. It ended up taking more than twenty years, but the CCP found a way to circumvent the Basic Law with questionable national security laws, which have found a way to censor (and even retro-censor) movies. There was a lot of uncertainty, however, and some directors and actors went to Hollywood to test their fortunes. John Woo was the first of the lot—if you exclude Jackie Chan’s failed attempts in the 1980s—and he had a promising start with Hard Target. Woo hit his stride with his third American film, Face/Off, which was a hit with both critics and audiences alike. He reached the apex of his Hollywood career with his fourth effort, Mission Impossible II.

Woo followed it up with the earnest-but-failed WW2 film, Windtalkers. He closed out his Hollywood phase with the generic sci-fi action film Paycheck with Ben Affleck. Upon returning to Hong Kong, he went for the big one and made the 4+ hour Three Kingdoms epic Red Cliff, which was broken up into two movies. Woo’s subsequent films had mixed reviews, and his current project is a remake of his own masterpiece, The Killer, but with Western actors.

Hard Boiled was not as successful as some of Woo’s earlier Heroic Bloodshed films, although it was probably the biggest of those in terms of scope and has a strong fan following to this very day. It also got a video game sequel, Stranglehold, for the Playstation 3 in 2007. It is arguably his bloodiest film, with a body count surpassing 300—307 to be exact, according to Collider. That would make it the second highest number for a movie set in contemporary films, a mere three dead bodies behind Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse[1]. And this movie is absolutely vicious: at least a third of the people killed are innocent bystanders, including doctors, nurses and hospital patients, all of whom are mercilessly mowed down during protracted climax at the hospital. For the scale of the action alone—not to mention that this is all practical effects—this is easily one of the best action films of the 1990s, if not all time, in all of world cinema.

Chow Yun-Fat’s Tequila is the definition of ultra-cool. He routinely fights with his boss to his face and ignores orders when he knows he’s right—apparently the Chinese title, Lashou Shentan, was also the Chinese title for Dirty Harry. And once Tequila has a loaded gun in his hand, he will (to quote Ordell Robie) “absolutely, positive kill every motherfucker in the room.” And yet, he’s not a perfect person by any means. He makes professional mistakes, has a turbulent love life with his colleague (Teresa Mo, of Lady Super Cop) and is constantly on the verge of getting fired for misconduct. And yet, he gets results. Crime in Hong Kong was hitting record highs in the 1990s—maybe John Woo shouldn’t have inspired so many youth to join the Triads with A Better Tomorrow—and seems to reflect Woo’s desire for the police to simply blow shit up for the common good (nevermind that Woo claims to be a pacifist).

The deeper character is saved for Tony Leung’s Alan, an undercover cop who’s been on the inside for so long that he no longer remembers his own birthday. He knows that his path will take him into some unsavory places, especially as he tries to bring down a horrible excuse for a human being like Johnny Wang. But even so, Alan does make some friends among Uncle Hoi’s men. So when the mission ultimately requires him to betray them, it takes its emotional toll on him the same way it would had he been a normal Triad betraying and murdering his old friends. It is thanks to Tequila’s constant support—despite their tense relationship—that he able to face his demons as he takes on Wang’s army during the last half of the film. This is film is obviously a template for his lauded role in Andrew Lau’s award-winning Infernal Affairs.

The rest of the actors all do credible jobs with their material. Phillip Chan was a former policeman before entering the movie industry and by this point, could play a police captain in his sleep. Teresa Mo was a respected comic actress and makes her limited role as Madam Chang work—she has a hard time getting along with Tequila at this point, but still respects his work as a cop and even calls out Chief Pang for favoring Alan over him. There is one scene where she callously shoots down a terrorist who slaps her, which was copied by Woo the following year in Hard Target. Stealing the show is Anthony Wong with his unhinged, but not quite over-the-top, performance as the crazy Johnny Wang. My favorite moment with him is when he justifies (to both himself and his men) waging an all-out war with the cops in the middle of a friggin’ hospital: “They only have .38s.” [Scoffs to the point of spitting]

Former Venom Mob trope member Phillip Kwok, who also plays the honorable assassin Mad Dog, orchestrated the big set pieces here. Hard Boiled is undoubtedly Kwok’s best work as an action director following the dissolution of the Venom Mob circa 1983. There are three major set pieces, with a couple of smaller ones, too. The movie opens with the infamous teahouse fight, which has Chow Yun-Fat and his team jumping over and ducking under tables while trading shots with arms dealers, while the undercover policeman guy just sprays everybody with bullets from his Uzi. This ends with the memorable scene of Chow Yun-Fat, covered in flour, pins the assassin to the ground with his gun, spits out his toothpick, and pulls the trigger. In a split second, his white face is covered with blood.

While the teahouse fight was a great example of a mounting a bloody gun battle in a closed space, the raid on Uncle Hoi’s arsenal (and Tequila’s subsequent raid on Johnny’s men) is a more open fight. The warehouse in which Hoi’s men are loading their guns into shipping containers is quite spacious, giving Johnny’s top enforcers (led by Mad Dog) lots of room to drive around on motorcycles and slaughter people wholesale with Uzis and Mac-10s. I’m pretty sure that the use of motorcycles in the climax of Hard Target was inspired by this sequence. Then Tequila goes all Rambo on everbody with an HK Submachine gun and a 12-gauge shotgun whose cartridges must have been loaded with nitroglycerin pellets, judging by the explosions they cause. The sight of Chow Yun-Fat blowing up motorcycles in mid-air made my 15-year-old brain explode back in the day.

The characters start converging on the hospital at around the hour mark, which is where the film spends the rest of its running time. After a few brief skirmishes between our heroes and the bad guys, there’s an intense bout of fisticuffs between Tony Leung, Chow Yun-Fat and Philip Kwok, set inside the villains’ arsenal. Upon their escape from the room, the film kicks into high-gear and never stops for a moment. My favorite single moment has Chow Yun-Fat sliding across the floor of the hospital lobby on his knees before taking out two bad guys with  a single shotgun blast. Bad. Ass. That scene is quickly followed by popular single tracking-shot gunfight as Alan and Tequila work their way through the halls of the hospital as they look for Johnny. Then there’s an absolutely insane rematch between the good guys and Mad Dog, but in this case, it’s a highly-choreographed gunfight, with them unloading hundreds of rounds at each other—Mad Dog is armed with an M-16 with a grenade launcher in this segment. And the madness does not end after that. This film is just absolutely berserk!

Hollywood has often tried to mimic the sheer insanity of Hard Boiled, but never quite made it there. Even John Woo himself never quite recaptured the emotions of this film’s action, and he was becoming a caricature of himself by the time he got to Mission Impossible II. The two Expendables films got the body count down, but were missing the style. Shoot’em Up came close, but was a bit silly for its own good. The Matrix and Mr. and Mrs. Smith had some great gunfights, but felt sanitized on the whole. Hard Boiled is where it’s at.

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[1] - The movies that beat those two were all historical or fantasy films with large-scale battle sequences, like Troy; The Last Samurai; and the Lord of the Rings movies.