Hard Boiled 4K 1992

Hard Boiled cop named Tequila (yes, that's his name) played by Chow Yun-Fat wages an uncompromising war against illegal arms shipments to Hong Kong. In this difficult endeavor, he has already lost his partner, but he has also found an ally—Tony (Tony Leung), a police officer working undercover in one of the gangs. It goes without saying that by joining forces, the protagonists will make life hell for all lawbreakers...

The plot is simple. The dialogues are even simpler and more naive. The script, which was once again almost completely rewritten just a week before filming began, offers no new twists. The main characters' resilience is the envy of all the Marvel comic book heroes put together. The protagonists are tough as nails. They never reload their weapons, but their gun magazines inexplicably always remain full of bullets for their next victims... There are a lot of clichés, even for 1992. But who will pay attention to that when John Woo has made a dream movie for any fan of the action genre?

“Well, he can shoot action movies,” one of the bosses at Universal once said about John Woo before he moved to Hollywood. “Yeah, and Michelangelo knew how to paint ceilings,” Quentin Tarantino later commented on the above statement. What am I getting at? The point is that, even with the best will in the world, it is impossible to call the action scenes in Hard Boiled action scenes in the usual sense of the word. It is ballet, a beautiful, violent, dizzying dance with magnificent choreography, staging, stunt work, and execution.

The film begins with a scene in a teahouse in which about as many people die as in the first twenty-five minutes of Saving Private Ryan. But that was just the beginning; the best was yet to come. Next, the director stages a spectacular battle in a warehouse, slowly but surely preparing the audience for the last hour of the film, which can safely be called “Die Hard in a Hospital.”

It is here that John Woo, as they say, took action to a new level. The last thirty minutes of the film are one of the most impressive and adrenaline-fueled action sequences known to mankind, in which the body count runs into the dozens, if not hundreds. But these mind-boggling thirty minutes contain their own mini-masterpiece (although the prefix “mini” can be safely discarded) — a three-minute action scene shot in one take without any editing, in which Tony and Tequila make their way through the endless corridors of the hospital and, literally, sweep away everything in their path.

Hard Boiled is the most frenzied and dynamic two hours ever filmed by John Woo, in which he brilliantly used his unique visual style to create a film that far surpasses all of the director's Hollywood works.