Let's be clear about this, John Woo's Hard Boiled is one of the greatest action films ever made. I started to hear about Woo's genre reinventing films like The Killer and A Better Tomorrow from UK film magazines and when the chance to catch his latest at the local Art House Cinema, I jumped at the chance. I was a giggling wreck.
The two handed gun play was cool, the balletic, poetically paced editing jaw dropping and the unmatched, slow-motion gun play electrifying. And the ultra-violence, eclipsing western culture's controversial Rambo bodycount and carnage in its opening shootout alone, was music to my eyeballs.
Chow Yun-Fat's toothpick chewing, ultra cool Tequila is a legend, plain and simple. Only a man of his superior movie star charm could pull off a character so cocky and arrogant and make him the guy you want to cheer for. The rest of the cast do their best to keep up but this is Fat's show.
But this film is all about the action. The secret is the over the top, fantasy gun play. The shoot outs are played out like in the imagination of a 7 year old kid; everything occurs in a slowed down version of reality where guns don't require reloading, bullets can be anticipated and dodged, all bullet hits to the good guys are merely inconvenient flesh wounds and impact wounds occur with all the ferocity of a liquid crimson Hiroshima blast.
Hard Boiled may not be the greatest action film in the world (Die Hard has that distinction in my book) but it may very well have the best action IN a film. And for an action fan, that's quite a profound statement to make.
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