Action fans self-educating about the best the genre has to offer might have spent some time in the ’90s searching for a video store that would carry landmark Hong Kong pictures that received only small-scale U.S. releases, if they made it over here at all. After famed Hong Kong director John Woo did some time in Hollywood later in the decade (and filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino name-checked movies like The Killer in their films), these titles became better-known. But 2020s action aficionados have unexpectedly had a chance to relive that decades-earlier scarcity thanks to rights issues that have kept some of these Hong Kong films out of proper circulation. So it’s a major event that Woo’s 1992 “bullet ballet” extravaganza Hard Boiled isn’t just back on disc and newly available on 4K streaming, but has been painstakingly restored to look as good as ever. The restoration debuted at Cannes last month and is now available to stream at home.
Action fans self-educating about the best the genre has to offer might have spent some time in the ’90s searching for a video store that would carry landmark Hong Kong pictures that received only small-scale U.S. releases, if they made it over here at all. After famed Hong Kong director John Woo did some time in Hollywood later in the decade (and filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino name-checked movies like The Killer in their films), these titles became better-known. But 2020s action aficionados have unexpectedly had a chance to relive that decades-earlier scarcity thanks to rights issues that have kept some of these Hong Kong films out of proper circulation. So it’s a major event that Woo’s 1992 extravaganza Hard Boiled isn’t just back on disc and newly available on 4K streaming, but has been painstakingly restored to look as good as ever. The restoration debuted at Cannes last month and is now available to stream at home.
Hard Boiled was the last movie Woo made before jumping to Hollywood for the following year’s Hard Target. (He has yet to conclude his Hard Trilogy.) Of his American films, only Face/Off really recaptures the full spirit of his best Hong Kong work, and that movie’s serious-minded (if still delightful and often darkly hilarious) exploration of duality owes more to Woo’s more existential and guilt-ridden The Killer than Hard Boiled. The latter is a movie that might seem easier to pull off than the noirish melodrama of The Killer, but its tone may be even trickier. (Witness the fact that Woo himself decided to remake The Killer himself; a pretty fun American version came to Peacock last summer.)
The film’s plot is a little convoluted, but easy enough to summarize: cop “Tequila” Yuen (Chow Yun-fat) pursues gun-smuggling gangsters, eventually teaming up with Alan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a fellow cop gone deep undercover as a ruthless assassin. It kinda-sorta takes the form of buddy-cop picture, but Hard Boiled has the peculiar distinction of being funny and playful without necessarily affecting a traditionally comedic tone – like what it might look like if the diametrically opposed cop and criminal from Infernal Affairs (or, for Americans, the U.S. remake The Departed, or something like Heat) weren’t ultimately on opposite sides.
There’s less room for existential crisis there, while still keeping Hard Boiled well above the smirky japery of its action-comedy cousins. Woo assembles some of the most purely spectacular (and impressively violent) action sequences ever put to film, climaxing with a wild 30-minute hospital blow-out featuring more guys jumping through glass windows than you’ve ever seen in your life, and wherein Chow Yun-fat famously dispatches multiple enemies whilst tenderly holding and comforting a newborn.
All of this – the hospital sequence, a warehouse sequence with a bunch of motorcycles, and even the parts where guys aren’t getting shot all to hell – looks particularly gorgeous in this new restoration, preserving the rich, firework-y oranges of the movie’s explosions and gunfire; the red streaks of blood; the streaks of light and wisps of post-gunfire smoke. Woo’s bombastic yet balletic style influenced plenty of movies that followed, but the American action pictures that feel most directly imitative of Hard Boiled tend to get all self-conscious about their desire to go over-the-top, something that seemingly comes naturally to Woo. That’s why so many of his movies are both dramatically effective and sincerely funny; it never feels like he’s sweating for either effect.
Perhaps oddly, one movie that gets it closer to right is The Fate of the Furious, which opts for direct homage: In one thread of its multi-ring climax, former baddie Jason Statham takes it upon himself to protect the infant son of Dom, participating in a major airplane shoot-out while toting the baby around in a carrier (with protective headphones, of course, to muffle the gunfire; the Hard Boiled babies have to make do with cotton balls). But come to think of it, the best Fast & Furious movies do combine sincere melodrama and absolutely nutso action sequences. The John Wick movies, too, have that mix of genuine attachment to its characters and action so committed that you might laugh out loud at its audacity.
Mostly, though, Woo has remained one of those filmmakers who is easily to imitate on a superficial level because of all of his trademarks, and nearly impossible to fully translate. (His own uneven Mission: Impossible II is case in point.) Better to just experience it firsthand.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.