Movie Tasting: John Woo's Hard Boiled (1992) + Filthy, Filthy Orange Wine
The reigning champion of action movies. Period.
ACTION SCENES: 7
TOTAL ACTION TIME: 60/128 min. (46.9/100)
CHOREOGRAPHY: 9/10
STUNTS: 8/10
EDITING: 10/10
FINALE: 10/10
MISCELLANEOUS MENTIONS: None.
TOTAL ACTION JUNKIE SCORE: 104
READ HOW THE ACTION JUNKIE SCORE WORKS
"You used to be so sensitive as a cadet. Now you're so hard."
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new champion.
I wondered if anything could unseat The Fantastic Magic Baby for the top slot on my Action Junkie Score scorecard. It was a bit of a cheat, as it only had a 60 minute total runtime with 65% (39 minutes) devoted to action. Hard Boiled is only 46.9% action but it's runtime is over TWICE as long as Magic Baby! This, combined with more action scenes and tippity top scores for all the individual action elements gave John Woo's masterpiece a 2.2 point lead, and so Here. We. Fucking. Are.
I have long admired Hard Boiled, but fanboy'd over Face/Off even more. As a story and complete package, Face/Off still reigns supreme, but as an action film, this recent rewatch convinced me to hand the crown back to HB.
Hard Boiled starts with a wild shootout in a bird cafe (yes, like a cat cafe, but with birds. In cages. Let the term paper theses begin.) This opening set piece is chaotic in a way that's *almost* too much follow. The editing is whiplash fast and the characters leap and roll and twist one way then another in seemingly random fashion. But after a few seconds you start to realize: it's all stitching together, and you don't have to struggle to follow the choreography. If you relax and just let the barrage of images and sounds flow, it all coheres. It's meant to be "chaotic" in feel, but it is in fact very, very, jaw-droppingly, carefully crafted.
This is, in essence, John Woo's entire style of action filmmaking: while many filmmakers contributed to the evolution of hand-to-hand combat and vehicular mayhem, Woo is just about the sole pioneer of complex choreography in terms of gunfights. "Gun fu" being the official term coined. Director Kurt Wimmer would try to add "gun kata" into the mix with his sci-fi action flick "Equilibrium". And "bullet ballet" is yet another, lesser used term, though more fitting given the number of times bodies soar through the air as though part of a prancing, leaping, athletic display of physical prowess, even though every character is only shooting guns. Once you realize the complex editing isn't there to confuse, but to create the very complexity we crave from imaginatively crafted set pieces, the brain unclenches and our enjoyment begins.
Shortly after the opening shootout, Chow Yun-Fat's character is brought aside by an older police force veteran played by John Woo himself. Woo says "You used to be so sensitive as a cadet. Now you're so hard." This is Chow's entire career trajectory mentioned in a single statement: Chow began as a romantic comedy actor, but then Woo got his hands on him beginning with A Better Tomorrow. And with every subsequent project pushed Chow into darker, more violent territory, all culminating in the unsentimental brutality of Hard Boiled.
The story follow's Chow - the epynonymous hard-boiled cop - and Tony Leung, who plays a gang member courted by a rival gang of arms dealers led by an incredibly vicious Anthony Wong and his right hand man played by my favorite of Chang Cheh's Five Venoms, Phillip Kwok! Kwok's character'sa name, it should be mentioned, is "Mad Dog". Same name as the right hand man to the main baddie in "The Raid", played by Yayan Ruhian. I have to assume that was a shout out to Hard Boiled.
But fascinatingly, the "Mad Dog" in Hard Boiled, for all his nigh-unkillableness and absolute agression, hits a moral wall in the finale, balking at killing women, kids, the elderly, even newborns! I wonder if the Mad Dog in The Raid was commentary/escalation on Hard Boiled's versio of the character. Showing how much more unforgiving and unavoidably violent the world has become.
But before we dive deeper into the finale, let's also talk about the handful of other, absolutely flawless set pieces that take place in a warehouse and on a boat, scenes of perfectly composed brutality and violence mixed with a surprising kineticism, surprising even to those of us used to this HK "heroic bloodshed" subgenre. And in-between, there's this sentimental shmaltziness as the elderly gang boss that Tony Leung works for accepts his fate, accepts that Leung betrayed him because it's the future, he had to, Anthony Wong being the kind of vicious little shit the old gangster had no interest in living to see take over. Hmm, similar to the two Mad Dogs. Life goes on. And gets better overall. But the pockets get deeper, and therefore darker.
When we arrive at the hospital, for the finale we are only at the halfway point of the movie's runtime. I used to think this was wall-to-wall action from the moment our protagonists arrive. But not quite: it takes a little while to truly get going, but we esssentially never leave the hospital once we're there. And it's the HALFWAY POINT. One hour in, and we've arrived at the end. 68 minutes remaining. But the finale doesn't run that entire hour and change, at least not based on my action junkie score rules and how much downtime is allowed before the resumption of action has to be called a new action scene. But the "finale" nevertheless does run an impressive 39 mintues of unbroken action. 39 minutes!!!
This blows Face/Off out of the water (pun intended, given the finale to that movie.) It blows everythign John Woo has ever done before or after, with the exception of *maybe* Red Cliff. Hard Boiled may contain Woo's trademark sentimentality all throughout, but it also counterbalances that with some of the most unforgiving innocent bystander collatoral damage this side of Robcop. There is even an exceptionally challenging scene where one cop accidentally kills another cop, point blank, in the choas of all the carnage. Chow Yun-Fat's character immediately steps up and decalres "No you didn't! That never happened! Keep fighting!" The crossroads where innocence and good intentions meets the necessity of reality is Woo's sweet spot. Almost no one does it better, except, weirdly, Steven Speilberg. Though the two directors' styles are nothing alike.
Hard Boiled was Woo's swang song and love letter to golden age Hong Kong cinema, and it really is unsurpassed. It was the perfect way to bow out, and then attempt to replicate the energy and spirit of the genre in Western cinema, which he did to varying degrees of success, until Face/Off. And then, frankly, never again after that.
***
WINE PAIRING:
Something DIRTY, darlings. This is not a movie to be precious about your trigger warning taste buds or snowflake stomach lining. Go buy that stupidly young 2021 Napa Cabernet or 2019 Barolo - journey to the source and ask for a "barrel sample" of the same, if you dare.
But wait, you want to ENJOY something but have it still be a filthy little Don Johnson? I've got you covered, mon freres. ORANGE wine. Biodynamic and/or organic, unfiltered, with massively long skin contact. I'm drinking one right now made from the Palomino grape (a core grape used for Sherry) From the bowels-of-hell hot climate of Baja California and the winery "Las Casa Vieja".
This is the kind of dark amber bullshit I'm talking about:
With gag inducing sediment like this:
That stains its own fucking bottle like this:
But it's delicious. Just...don't drink the bottom of the glass.
(If Baja California wine seems too wtf, you can, believe it or not, more easily find Rkatsiteli orange wine from the country of Georgia, which is usually just as stupidly dark and dusty and intense.)