John Woo’s Last True Hong Kong Masterpiece Was This Vicious Dirty Harry-Inspired Thrill Ride -

The legendary Hong Kong films of director John Woo have influenced American action filmmakers for nearly four decades. He crafted a new visual language through his signature ‘heroic bloodshed’ storylines that featured eye-popping gunplay mixed with melodramatic themes. As the crossover success of A Better Tomorrow and The Killer resulted in his global influence on action cinema by the early ‘90s, Woo proved that he was ready for Hollywood when he made his magnum opus, Hard Boiled, in 1992.

In contrast to past films that concentrated heavily on Hong Kong gangster life, Woo turned his attention to the cop movie genre, which was a winning formula for Hollywood in the early ‘90s. He continues to put his cinematic stamp on the picture while capitalizing on a rare buddy movie element in his work through the relationship between Chow Yun-fat’s Inspector Tequila and Tony Leung’s Triad assassin Alan. Out of any Hong Kong work in his filmography, Hard Boiled was Woo’s one-way ticket to the West.

What Is ‘Hard Boiled’ About?

Yun-fat’s Inspector Tequila is a hardened Chinese cop who shares traits of Dirty Harry and Bullitt. He’s often at odds with his superiors for his aggressive style of policing, most notably his use of firing twin guns on the bad guys. Tequila’s chief (Philip Tang) reprimands the inspector following a violent gangland shootout that leaves several dead bodies, including his partner, a potential Triad witness, and an undercover cop posing as a drug dealer. As Tequila turns his attention to a gang war between the elderly “Uncle” Hoi (Kwan Hoi-san) and his young rival Johnny Wong (Anthony Wong), the inspector crosses paths with Hoi’s top hitman, Alan. Little does Tequila know that Alan is an undercover cop so deep in the underworld that he struggles with his true identity. Alan reluctantly turns on Hoi to side with Wong during a warehouse ambush but spares Tequila’s life amid the chaos. When the two men decide to join forces upon Tequila learning about Alan’s true identity, they must infiltrate Wong’s secret vault of illegal weapons hidden in the basement of a Hong Kong hospital.

Hard Boiled retains the duality theme of The Killer with Yun-fat as the strong-willed detective opposite the morally conflicted undercover cop in Leung’s Alan. Though Yun-fat’s Tequila shares the same frustration with bureaucracy as Clint Eastwood’s iconic hero with the .44 Magnum, he is far more open to a soulful life outside police work. Tequila unwinds while performing jazz saxophone at a nightclub and shares a romance with police colleague Teresa (Teresa Mo). In contrast, Alan is a loner who makes origami cranes for the enemies he leaves dead. Given his troubled assignment and the betrayals he gets involved in, Alan is far more fractured from a moral standpoint than most of Woo’s anti-hero characters, who retain their principles. Due to the urgency of the final act showdown against Wong’s men, Tequila and Alan never share the kind of close partnership that Riggs and Murtaugh do in Lethal Weapon. Yet, they come to see eye-to-eye in protecting innocent people.

‘Hard Boiled’ Features an Unintentional Nod to ‘Terminator 2′

Chow Yun-fat as Tequila covered in white dust pointing a gun at a gangster in Hard Boiled. — Image via Golden Princess Film Production

At a time when the action genre was beginning to raise the spectacle level with classics such as Die Hard and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Woo’s action sequences in Hard Boiled were dialed up to limits that go further than any of his work to that point. Featuring gun battles that rival A Better Tomorrow II’s ultra-violent finale, Woo manages to craft some of the biggest action stunts in his filmography, ranging from Tequila firing guns while sliding down stairs, a massive warehouse shootout involving motorcycles, and an ambitious third act climax in a hospital featuring Tequila protecting infants from gun-wielding gangsters. The finale also gives way to Woo’s most groundbreaking feat: a five-minute uninterrupted take without a single cut as the camera follows Tequila and Alan moving through the hospital corridors, blasting through armed Triads in their way.

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Woo’s ambitions for Hard Boiled were at a time when T2 had raised the bar in blockbuster action pictures. Ironically, Woo’s film features a nod to the James Cameron hit that the director revealed in his DVD audio commentary was not intentional: Leung’s Alan, dressed in a police uniform, carrying a flower box with a pistol inside, intended to save a hospitalized colleague from the Triads. One could even see hints of Woo’s influence on Cameron’s work not only by doing slow-motion action scenes in T2 but also with the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger using twin Uzis on terrorists in True Lies.

Between its heightened scale and retaining some compelling, multidimensional characters, Hard Boiled became the template for Woo’s American filmography with hits such as Face/Off and Mission: Impossible II. He took a straightforward cop movie concept and brought his groundbreaking cinematic style to elevate it to levels that make it explosive both in terms of action and drama.