The Rouge Cop and the Undercover Cop up against some gangster motherfuckers in John Woo's blueprint on how to make the motherfucker of all motherfuckin' action movies. The Jazz Club. The paperboy. The fuckin' birds at the teahouse. The first time Tequila shoots 2 guns at once. Automatic fuckin' weapons. Staircase ownage. Tequila's toothpick. White as a ghost. A chat with JW. High-tech computers. The last book your fuckin' ass will ever read. Pretty-pretty-oh-so-fuckin'-pretty flowers. Never trust an icky eel. Anthony Wong's hair. Fishin'. The impossible question: Who's a badder badass motherfucker; Mad Dog from Hard Boiled or Mad Dog from The Raid? Motorcycle madness. A grand fuckin' entrance. A Zippo. Paper cranes. Fun on a boat. Fuckin' Foxy. Mad…

An absolutely ballistic, no-holds-barred, over-the-top yet purely unadulterated action extravaganza to come out from Hong Kong during the the early 90s, Hard Boiled raises the bar for action in cinema with its heart-pounding & jaw-dropping sequences and cements John Woo's reputation as the most influential director when it comes to action filmmaking.

The story of Hard Boiled concerns two ace cops; one is a tough-as-nails detective in his department while the other one works as an undercover agent and has risen sharply in the underworld over the years. The plot covers their initial friction with each other followed by a mutual partnership as the two eventually team up to take down & wipe out Hong Kong's most ruthless mobster & his crime syndicate.…

"it happened so quickly... it was like a dream"

my favorite woo simply because it takes his sense of empathy to the forefront, and places it in direct opposition with his action. like mann, woo is a filmmaker of romance and moral codes on both sides of the law, of people that yearn for love and connection, trapped by institutions that swallow them. their jobs, their actions, their sense of 'right' and 'wrong' reduced to an infinitely layered blur of bodies, objects and movement in a perpetual state of collapse—it's abstract extravagance. there's an inherent romance to it, not just for the characters whose only means of expression it is, but for the audience too, and woo doesn't even pretend…

From the opening scene of the rain covered, neon lit streets of the city, superimposed over Chow Yun-Fat sweating, drinking a slammer and playing clarinet in a dark jazz club, we can see that this film matches its title perfectly. This is a Hard-Boiled police story in the grand tradition of Harry Callaghan, Popeye Doyle and Frank Bullitt. Everything is black and white, the hero does what needs to be done to save the day and the brass at City Hall don't like it they can swivel. In fact Chow Yun-Fat's character, Tequila Yuen, seems to contain every cop cliché there is: matchstick chewing renegade cop, putting himself in the mind of the killer, eating around dead bodies. That's okay…

A catalogue of every image, theme and move John Woo had made his own in the previous five years blow up to an extreme beyond even his usual outsized melodramatics. Written as it was been filmed (when Tony Leung amazing introduction was shot he was supposed to be an actual psychotic killer) it remain coherent and surprising emotional effective thanks to how focused Woo’s images are. The film is predicted in a motif of collateral damage, unlike The Killer there is always an innocent around ready to be shot and even our heroes can’t do nothing but occasionally hit the wrong target. A place of healing is turned into an war zone between a whole inefficient government (who does more…

Wow. I'm not sure exactly what I expected going into this, but it certainly isn't what I got. This is the actioniest of all movies that ever dared to action. Just superb in so many ways, I'm not quite going to count them but I am going to try and highlight a few of my favorite parts.

Firstly, and most obviously, the hyper-stylized nature of the movie is just outstandingly beautiful. Not to mention it heightens the intensity of the action sequences, and by that I mean basically the entire film. It isn't that I haven't seen this sort of thing done before, it's just done so much better here than I have ever seen. The fact that it was…

I've seen Face/Off already so I'm not entirely new to John Woo, but this is the first of his Hong Kong movies I've had the pleasure of seeing. Apparently his earlier efforts were more well regarded in Hong Kong but this one was a hit in the west. I can see why. He k owns how to execute a gunfight on camera, and there's plenty of action to like here. That's not to say the characters aren't memorable though. Chow Yun Fat is Tequila, the tough cop out to avenge his partner after a scuffle with gun smugglers leaves him dead. His run ins with a apparent triad gangster make him determined to put him away but Tequila discovers him…

Awesome every time, somehow firing its tone like a bullet into the narrow crack between farcical and cloying. The director makes a cameo so he can say stuff like "We don't get everything we want in life" then walk away, but there's still nothing pretentious about this -- it's light on its feet and punishingly visceral, which is quite a hard thing to believe, until you realize that its iconic image is Chow Yun-motherfucking-fat running down stairs with his back 90-degrees leaned over a bannister firing two guns at once. Grace and violence, classic Woo.

The emotion of the story doesn't quite land the way it does in THE KILLER, which is why I'll always find this inferior, but on…