Hard Boiled

This movie was disappointing. I had hoped I would like it more than I did. I love action movies that do something novel with their gunplay and John Woo is often considered the father of the Hong Kong action film variant known as gun-fu. On the other hand, I loathe Woo’s Hollywood contributions, namely Face/Off and Mission Impossible 2. However, I believed that I should reserve judgment until I had the chance to see the films that made his career; the films where everything went right and his creative vision was realized. This movie is him in his prime, in his element, in his native China, directing his favorite leading man: Chow Yun Fat. Honestly, I’m still not that impressed.

Like a handful of landmark cinema I’ve seen, Hard Boiled seems to be one of those movies that inspired a lot of much better imitators. This movie broke really interesting ground in its action and choreography. The way that the movie takes traditions of the wuxia style, such as making the weapon an extension of the character wielding it, and transports them out of their traditionally historical settings and into a gritty, crime infested 90s Hong Kong is something special. Similarly, the creative use of slow motion and visually rich frames, full of birds, sparks, haze/smoke, etc., adds an element of cool chaos that elevates the action above what Hollywood was mostly producing at that time. The problem is that I’ve seen all of the movies that did the Hard Boiled thing, and did it better.

Movies like John Wick, The Matrix, or even Equilibrium (for all its faults) nail the gun-fu concept as good as, if not better, than Hard Boiled while also generally having higher quality production values, better overall storytelling, and tighter pacing. This isn’t to take anything away from Hard Boiled, per se, as the influence of Woo’s filmmaking on these films is unmistakable. In John Wick, the neon drenched night club provides a visually stimulating playground to host a wild shoot out in the same way Woo uses the chop shop in Hard Boiled. Only, in Hard Boiled the cutting torches and welders don’t serve a purpose and are just there so that they can throw sparks, which look cool. Both The Matrix and Hard Boiled have a scene where two action leads gear up before taking on a seemingly insurmountable garrison of enemies. The Matrix weaves this moment into a comfortable ebb and flow of action, tension, and release as the film builds to its conclusion. Hard Boiled uses this to kick start an climatic action sequence that, while full of cool moments, overstays its welcome and gets repetitive.

Despite the poor pacing and silly staging, the story still hangs together reasonably well. There is an intricate plot that pits two rival gangs of Triads, and the police, against each other with plenty of twists and turns and surprise reveals along the way. It is even fun, most of the time, each time a new surprise is revealed. Sometimes the character motivations don’t make a ton of sense, and the ending takes the heart pounding action of the final showdown and wraps it up with a bit of a narrative anticlimax, but up until that point it all works reasonably well. Certainly better than the bonkers nonsense of something like Face/Off.

While I think it is no accident that many stunt work aficionados love John Woo, even some of his stranger and less refined offerings like Hard Target, the wow factor for the average viewer isn’t there when you care less about the history and more about the direct comparison to the rich plethora of films made by those aficionados.

Hard Boiled ends up very much in the camp of style over substance. It is why the pacing is off and the ending goes on for too long only to resolve in an anticlimax. It’s why you are often left scratching your head as to why things happen the way they do in the movie’s story and general construction. They are all in service of what is cool. However, other films have learned so much from Woo, and from Hard Boiled more specifically, that we now have Hollywood movies with the same amount of cool and also all the things Woo didn’t bother to polish or perfect. This isn’t a bad movie, it’s just not a particularly amazing one either. I wanted to see how Woo’s original, groundbreaking Hong Kong films defined a new style of action filmmaking. I wanted to see Woo at his most grounded, without the excess that Hollywood presumably brought out. In the end, I instead came away with the recognition that I probably just don’t like John Woo films very much.

Would Recommend: If you are deeply passionate about the art of action filmmaking and stunt design.

Would Not Recommend: If you are expecting a transcendent mixture of martial arts and gunplay.