Hard Boiled (Lashou shentan)

Few directors have mastered an aspect of movie making as John Woo did master the action scenes craft, and that is especially true in his Hong Kong era before he moved to Hollywood and started to parody himself in a series of movies not even worth mentioning.

But when he worked with actors like Chow Yun Fat or Tony Leung, the results can be of epic proportions and that's what happned with Hard Boiled the action movie that kills all action movies and which influenced a wide variety of movie making and even Video game design and level management

Law (Yun Fat) is a Hong Kong cop with unorthodox methods and a love for Jazz music, while he is investigating some gun trade he ends up in a violent encounter with some mobsters and accidently killing an undercover cop, while his partner also passes away.

This trauma leads him to dig deeper which his boss () disapproves and to make things worst he has an office romance gone wrong with one of his coworkers()

Yun (Tony Leung) is a hitman for the mob boss Hu () who is solitary, makes origamis and dreams of running from it all, what happens is that the empire of Hu is about to be taken over by Johnny (Anthony Wong) who is the rising face in the underworld and who has managed to keep his major operations a secret from the police, competitors and even the undercover agents, who are still trying to find out about the depth of his involvement in the crime scene in HK

Law and Yun inevitably cross paths, and Hu and Johnny have to fight like ancient Chinese emperors about who will reign in the underworld, and all this potential leads the plot and the viewers into a an amazing cinematic roller coaster with a breathtaking suspense until the end

You can say what you want about the stylized violence in HK cinema but matter of fact the screen writing is always brilliant, the characters well drawn, with clear conflicts and large strokes, of course these characters bear more a resemblance to comic book heroes and it's all good because they really represent the symbolic that was the engine of the chivalry tale since the dawn of times.

These movies are just an update of the sword movies of the sixties, just a different setting and replacing swords with guns and machine guns, even the choreography of the scenes is almost identical, including broad movements, and virtuoso stunts moves, and compared to that, the whole matrix thing looks like a fourth mediocre copy

The last hour of the movie happens in a hospital, with a major suspense and a lot of lives on the line, and forget about the hospital's scene in «the dark knight» because this IS the hospital crisis situation that is the blueprint for all the movies that follow it, the only difference is that these movies have a big marketing machine behind them and familiar start faces, but never did any action movie in the last twenty years have reached this level of mastering, or very few did to be fair.

The thing you will remark also that this directing style had a very big influence on video game level design, and even characters, you will see your favorite characters from «counter strike» in here, and many games like that, and it is fair to say that if an actor can entertain a baby while killing with a machine gun, without being shocking or gross, it means that new grounds in movie making where opened, and this is the very definition of «genius».

year: 1992

Origin: Hong Kong

Director: John Woo

Acting: Chow Yun Fat, Tony Leung