Hard Boiled [1992] [John Woo]

There’s only so much that can be done onscreen involving a gun. There’s using them to hit people, shooting them out of opponents’ hands, and of course a barrage of bullets delivered by a variety of weapons. Hard Boiled accomplishes all of these options and then some. The early action scenes are exhilarating, bodies fly all over the place like shrapnel and blood explodes out of people in slow-motion. Centred around 4 action scenes, the other scenes don’t offer much else to engage with, just moving the narrative to different locations and bringing the characters along to reveal new motives for making fresh corpses.

Outside of the set-pieces we follow the underworld of the Triads and the police procedure, though there’s no realism to either group. It’s all rather silly and cheesy, with the obvious metallic-whooshing sound effects to attempt to heighten tension and suspense, it all rather falls flat. The music is excruciatingly bad, and accompanied by poor editing, specifically an overabundance of fading during mid-scene, make some scenes unbearable to watch from a technical standpoint.

Chow Yun Fat made his name in three “heroic bloodshed” (the name of the sub-genre of stylised-action Hong-Kong films) films directed by John Woo. One of the facets of this sub-genre is honour and duty, inspiring the “heroic” part of the term. There is a kind of twisted morality to the film, in the first lengthy opening shootout at least 50 people are taken out with one every couple of seconds, but the lead cop only shows sadness and overwrought regret when his partner is shot down – there’s no thought to the masses of other bodies littering the now-destroyed restaurant. The characterisations similarly don’t make sense, there’s an old gang leader who’s presented more like a doddering old grandpa, there’s no logic or reason to the writing. I found myself wincing at the image of the previously shown tough female cop going all of a flutter around babies at the nursery in the hospital, where the final showdown takes place. The script is sloppy and clichéd, in an early scene a killer takes out a man by shooting him in the head, a cop says out of nowhere “His shooting style is unique “ in a lazy attempt to build up the character and add mystery, it doesn’t work and just comes across as false – there’s nothing unique about shooting someone in the head.

Hard Boiled entertains when it abandons its attempts at truth and emotion and just goes all-out with the violence. But about two thirds into the film I was getting sick of it, there was nothing left to do with a gun. All the action scenes take place in irregular places, adding props and structures to blow up and to utilize in the fight, the most impressive being the midway warehouse scene. The body count is recorded as being 307, and the final action sequence is at least 25 minutes long (set in a hospital it mainly consisted of running through corridors, shooting patients – which didn’t aid the already long-gone ethics) – blood and guts are fine, but when there was this much of it the film got tedious fast.