Hard Boiled

Hard Boiled (Lat Sau San Taam) (1992)

Runtime: 128 epic, epic minutes

Directed by: John Woo

Starring: Chow Yun-Fat, Tony Leung, Teresa Mo, Philip Chan, Phillip Chung-Fung Kwok, Anthony Wong

From: Several different Hong Kong companies

If giving Hard Boiled the highest of marks for having such a legendary second half is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

First off, my schedule for the next few days will be completely out of whack and it may be a few days before I post again. Thankfully it's for a good reason this time: family is visiting the area so time will be spent in public with them. That included yesterday for several hours before I could post about a movie I saw Saturday night.

Long ago I viewed this motion picture for the first time; for reasons now not even known to me, I preferred The Killer so I waited so many years for a revisit. Turns out, I was a complete fool. As for 5 star ratings, I am personally stingy with them due to preference. This is a movie I could nitpick if I wanted to; however, I won't and as the second half is so masterfully done and was far more glorious than I had recalled, might as well give the film credit for that.

Instead of focusing on the underworld, John Woo wanted to make heroes out of police officers. The legendary Chow Yun-Fat played “Tequila”; imagine Dirty Harry if he played clarinet in a jazz band. Along with an undercover cop, they attempt to stop an upstart in “The Syndicate” along with his associates, including an appropriately named Mad Dog. The first half is pretty rad as there are great action beats to go along with the pathos and drama.

However, the second half raises all the stakes even higher than you can imagine. It's all OOT between character behaviors, the tragedy, the babies (oh yes, the final hour is entirely set in a hospital), the violence, the thousands of bullets fired, all the epic moments... it is like the thrill I still get when watching large stretches of other classics like Aliens or T2. Of course, everything revolving around one baby in particular is ludicrous but I'm sure that was the intention so might as well laugh along with the movie, right?

Perhaps it's how many movies in the 21st century (especially in the action genre) leave me wanting more or are just disappointing when it comes to those beats, but getting to see all the time and effort in putting together those astounding thrills and beats that still are effective if you get to experience it for the first time in '23... all the people behind the scenes and in front deserve all the credit for how amazing it was. What a shame that John Woo's Hollywood career wasn't that great to me although some like it more than I do; more should agree that Chow Yun-Fat had his talents wasted by Hollywood. At least Tony Leung had the exposure of Shang-Chi, even if the quality of the movie has been hotly debated.

A shame that in the United States, it can't legally be streamed, whether for free or a paid subscription. On the other hand, at least as of this moment there are several copies of fine quality on YouTube, which is the route I had to take. Then again, I understand that HD copies of the movie that look/sound worth a damn didn't really happen legally so it takes some Google-Fu to track down a digital or even BD-R copy that's better... hopefully one day someone like the Criterion Collection can fix that problem and give us a definitive version most worthy of a motion picture that most 80's/90's action fans should love.