Viking Night: Hard Boiled
By Bruce Hall
March 5, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
This movie is one part action, one part revenge thriller and all parts hyper-violent death opera - with a dash of superfluous romance thrown in. Sounds as American as apple pie, and why not? After becoming known for underworld morality plays like The Killer, Woo sought to outshine films like Lethal Weapon by ten megatons - and on the action side of the scale, he succeeds. Hard Boiled is little over two hours long, and almost half of it involves people flying through the air in slow motion, spewing hot lead from magic machine guns while everything around them explodes into billowing clouds of flame and smoke.
That's the exact same dream I have every night. But is it any good? Does it deserve the massive amounts of fawning nerd love that have been heaped on it over the ensuing decades?
Not exactly, but it sure has potential. Our hero is a gritty, cynical cop named Tequila (Chow Yun-Fat). He comes by his name honestly, pounding down shots of it while he indulges his off hours hobby - hand synching clarinet in a jazz band. And like most movie cops, Tequila is a shell of the man he once was. His rookie can-do idealism has long since been replaced by the jaded angst of someone who's given up on making a difference. Over time the system he swore to uphold has become riddled with graft and corruption. But being a cop is all he knows, so he deals with it the only way he knows how - by being a surly, defiant prick.
Somewhere, Clint Eastwood is smiling, and possibly screaming at a chair.
Tequila and his partner Benny (Bowie Lam) stake out a tea house where a gang of gun smugglers are making a deal. Things go bad when the third largest gunfight in the history of guns and fights breaks out. Not sure about the body count but it feels like 600, including Benny. Enraged, Tequila shoots the gang leader in the face instead of arresting him. This earns him an epic ass chewing from his boss, Superintendent Pang (Philip Chan). Tequila has cost the police their only source of information on a huge gun smuggling sting, so he’s busted off the case and warned to keep his nose clean, or else.
Somewhere, Danny Glover is not returning Mel Gibson’s phone calls.
Meanwhile, the man the cops are after is busy sizing up new blood. Johnny Wong (Anthony Wong) is currently the number two gun dealer in Hong Kong. He wants to be number one, but a rival named Uncle Hoi (Hoi-Shan Kwan) is in his way. Wong attempts to recruit Hoi's top lieutenant, a shadowy young man named Tony (Tony Leung). Tony is reluctant to switch sides, but Wong makes him a generous offer. In exchange for killing Hoi and handing over his merchandise, Tony becomes right hand man - complete with money, cars, women - whatever his black, twisted criminal heart desires. Intrigued, Tony leads Wong to Uncle Hoi's secret warehouse, where the violent power transfer is to take place.
Tequila conveniently finds out about the raid from an informant and shows up armed to the teeth. Things go bad when he intervenes in the raid, triggering the second largest gunfight in the history of guns and fights. For the better part of 15 minutes, everyone shoots everyone else and everything in the world explodes before Tequila finally comes face to face with a new adversary. Tony covers Wong's escape, and openly taunts Tequila - who becomes obsessed with bringing down this mysterious, arrogant killer. This kind of sounds like an episode of Miami Vice, except the plot is even harder to follow and everyone is wearing socks.
But it’s not always clear what's happening and why, and not just during the explodey parts. It's also because most of the movie hinges on one major plot point that makes very little sense. Of course, there's a reason Tequila is warned to avoid the case, but when he finally figures it out it's a little hard to understand why he was kept in the dark for so long. It becomes a bullshit singularity that forces several other subplots to also not make sense, and by the third act it's sucked all the logic right out of the film. All that's left is - finally - the largest gunfight in the history of guns and fights, and it goes on for so long you kind of become numb to it and stop caring.
But the plot isn't what you came for, right? A John Woo movie means lots of awkward, forced emotion, bird symbolism and mega violent super slow motion gun battles that will peel the enamel right off your teeth. And considering the total absence of logic, character development and credible dialogue here, the action scenes can't help but stand out. Everything is flammable, the good guys never get seriously hurt and nobody ever runs out of ammo. This sounds totally awesome, yet I called Hard Boiled “somehow” inferior to the American films it so desperately wants to be.
Why is that? It's because for all their over the top action, stupid dialogue and contempt for even the most basic laws of physics, great action films always have at least one tiny sliver of logic running through them that holds the whole damn thing together. No matter how dumb the movie is you can always say "Well, you know they kidnapped his daughter" or "They sold him out and left him for dead". Tequila does lose his partner at the beginning, but at the other end of this needlessly convoluted, totally nonsensical story it's not really about that anymore. It's about trying to mimic something without understanding how it’s really put together. As a result, Hard Boiled almost comes across as satire instead of homage.
It’s not awful, it’s just not nearly as good as it could be, or should be. Still, Woo’s style deeply influenced the next generation of filmmakers so whatever you think of action movies today, you can probably thank John Woo for at least some of it. Yippie Ki-Yay, America.