Innumerable bloodied bodies tossed wildly in all directions by a spray of unending gunfire. A seedy teahouse, an industrial warehouse and a crowded hospital lit up by countless muzzle flares, ricochet sparks and thunderous bursts of flame. Amid this tumultuous combative orchestration replete with motorcycle machine gunners, cold-blooded gun runners and the sounds of haunting jazz riffs stride three heroic figures all representing varying shades of jiang hu noblesse oblige.
Tequila (Chow Yun-fat) is the music-loving lawman and marksman, driven to avenge the death of his fallen partner even if it costs him his living or life. Alan (Tony Leung) is a man without an identity, a prized gangster lost between the murderous demands of the underworld and the greater loyalty to the undercover police assignment that has put him there. Mad Dog (Philip Kwok) is the most morally misaligned of the three, yet no less a heroic warrior of modernity. As the steely-eyed, right-hand man of the ambitious up-and-coming arms dealer Johnny Wong (Anthony Wong), Mad Dog lets his efficient killing instincts and hatred of police run amok only until innocents get in the way.
As fresh corpses created from each of these men and their carnivorous firearms pile high, the sun sets on the chaotic venue of a hospital converted to a killing field as doctors, patients and police are gunned down in a maelstrom of steaming lead. Wong, the instigator has gone from ruthlessly ambitious triad leader to desperate and deranged madman, capable of any atrocity. Outside, Hong Kong police, spear-headed by flak-jacketed SDU teams, mass in the hundreds. Hanging in the balance are the lives of surviving patients, including a maternity ward full of infants, and a massive cache of weapons symbolically hidden behind the hospital’s mortuary in the basement. With no other recourse, an epic battle of balletic gunplay and blood-soaked heroism erupts. Welcome to John Woo’s world.
Woo is the film’s director and HARD BOILED is its seemingly apt English title. This is the film that magnificently ended the director’s heroic bloodshed cycle in Hong Kong. It began gloriously with A BETTER TOMORROW seven years prior, cut through a lesser sequel and previously capped with the hyper-stylized THE KILLER.
The term heroic bloodshed generally refers to the excessive, modern gunplay sagas of the 1980s and early ’90s that were led by Woo’s brand of brotherhood under fire and self sacrifice. I prefer to stretch that label further to include the films’ forbearers, the bloody swordplay sagas of Woo’s mentor Chang Cheh and of Woo himself who released his sole wuxia effort, LAST HURRAH FOR CHIVALRY, in 1977.
HARD BOILED is essentially an encore for Woo and superstar Chow Yun-fat. It rehashes many of the visual and thematic motifs of A BETTER TOMORROW, yet with a story that glamorizes the cops instead of the gangsters and puts much more emphasis on action thrills.
The years 1992 and ’93 saw a crazed burst of wild genre output from Hong Kong filmmakers seemingly working with wild abandon, knowing that their future was uncertain with the collapse of the studio system and the impending 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China. Woo seems to have gotten caught up in this frenzy and went all out to produce an action movie that pushed its stylized violence to extremes. He certainly succeeded with the able assistance of action director and co-star Philip Kwok.
Despite Kwok’s early fame as a kung fu player, the wire-enhanced gunplay and explosive pyrotechnics of HARD BOILED are arguably his finest career performance. The action set pieces are sublime in their clear presentation and kinetic execution. This is the stuff that adulating Hollywood filmmakers like Walter Hill and Quentin Tarantino could only dream of making at the time. Kwok had basically no previous experience with gunplay but has no trouble in translating Woo’s vision into screen reality.
The showstopper is an uninterrupted, 3-minute sequence in the hospital where Chow Yun-fat and co-star Tony Leung blast their way through hallways on two separate floors. In reality, the shot was broken in half near an elevator due to technical difficulty, but the transition is seamless and the intended effect remains intact. We are served with a fantastic gunplay scene that shows off the tremendous skill of the stuntmen, actors and crew involved. It can only be rivaled by the epic, single-take fight sequence in Prachya Pinkaew’s TOM YUM GOONG (aka THE PROTECTOR).
In addition to his stunt choreography, Kwok steps into an important screen role written expressly for him as the ruthless henchman Mad Dog. Woo clearly fell in love with this character during shooting as he gives Kwok generous amounts of flattering screen time that doesn’t do much for the former FIVE VENOMS star as an actor but certainly shows off the more menacing and lethal side of his charismatic physicality. It is amazing to see this kung fu star along with Lo Meng, playing a lesser gangster, interacting with high caliber actors like Chow and Tony Leung. It is these two latter actors who elevate the film beyond mere genre entertainment.
Chow presents himself as a different sort of action hero, a warrior whose exceptional gunplay skills and willingness to use them are juxtaposed with a tender side and a twinkle in his eye. Perhaps this is not unlike Bruce Willis’ John McClane character, although I’d say that McClane is far more cynical that Tequila.
While tracking down gangsters, Tequila juggles an estranged relationship with his girlfriend (Teresa Mo), conflicting ideals with his boss (Philip Chan) and a professional rivalry with Leung. Keeping him level is the bartender (John Woo) of a local jazz club he regularly moonlights at as a jazz clarinetist. Tequila’s humanity really shines through near the end as Chow soothes an infant during a shootout, before catching fire during a blast and watching in amusement as the kid extinguishes the flames by urinating. Seriously, I miss the old promo and DVD art where Chow is shown in SDU gear while holding an infant. It sums up the duality of his character in this movie perfectly.
As much as I love Chow in his role as Tequila, Leung steals the show as the conflicted undercover cop. Tony Leung Chiu-wai, not to be confused with Tony Leung Ka-fai, is by far my favorite Hong Kong actor of the last 20 years. He’s proven himself time and again in a wide variety of roles, most notably in most of Wong Kar-wai’s films.
Leung has mastered the art of projecting emotion onscreen with minimal expression. While Chow remains largely cool to a fault, Leung displays worry, indecision and fear in a subtle way that suggests he can’t afford to let it show, at least to his enemies. It’s a tough role, especially in a movie filled with such excessive violence. It would be easy to get carried away, yet he maintains just the right amount of control. There is a moment when he’s forced to turn on his former triad boss that is priceless.
Anthony Wong is also a great actor but he doesn’t do much for me as the crazed lead villain in HARD BOILED. It says something that John Woo felt it necessary to add Philip Kwok as his muscle. Wong never finds his character in order to project a convincing level of threat. In my mind Wong really didn’t come into his own until a year later with the release of the category III thriller THE UNTOLD STORY where he essentially played Hong Kong’s version of Hannibal Lector.
I would have loved to have seen a darker, grittier story play out to the end. HARD BOILED starts out that way with a haunting visual climax to an opening gunfight and later with Leung’s inner conflict over the jiang hu code of honor he’s forced to break for the sake of his job. Cruel violence, particularly towards nameless extras and a few supporting characters remains ever present to the end yet there is a feeling I get that Woo already had his eyes on Hollywood and was trying to craft a palatable movie that would appeal to Western audiences and perhaps more specifically Western producers. The edge of Woo’s earlier gangster films is softened a tad by heroic convention. That doesn’t mean the blood squibs stop exploding but it does mean that like Jet Li’s FIST OF LEGEND, a life of justifiable violence is rewarded so long as you’re the good guy. What this suggests is that Woo decided to move beyond his chief influences like Chang Cheh, Jean-Pierre Melville and Kinji Fukasaku to embrace a level of idealism that was likely more in keeping with his own personality.
I cannot fault the production itself at any level. The real-world locations are used and abused to wonderfully destructive effect. The camera work is measured and the editing sharp. Planned chaos frequently erupts onscreen and yet it’s never difficult to follow the progress of the action.
Best of all is the moody score by Michael Gibbs, an accomplished jazz performer and composer. John Woo has always been a big jazz fan and had originally planned to match THE KILLER with a jazz soundtrack. The producers didn’t let him but with greater control on HARD BOILED he was not only able to get his way, but work the jazz reference into the script by portraying Tequila as a part-time jazz musician. It’s highly unusual to have this much thought go into a soundtrack for a Hong Kong movie during this era and Woo can be commended for the effort. Gibbs’ arrangements are reminiscent of the ambient score Vangelis provided for BLADE RUNNER. (I’m sure someone better versed than I in noir soundtracks could come up with a better comparison.)
As a “hard-boiled” gangster film, HARD BOILED is a little bit of a disappointment. It lacks the genuine dramatic intensity of Woo’s past gunplay films. The trademark conventions he draws on are not as fresh as they once were. This became an unfortunate pattern in subsequent years as Woo tried to apply the same tricks over and over again in Hollywood. Thankfully, as a pure adrenaline rush of ballistic brilliance HARD BOILED is unmatched. It’s an action movie lover’s Holy Grail of bad ass, leaping gunplay with the “killer” team of John Woo and Chow Yun-fat at their visceral best.
by Mark Pollard
