Hard Boiled (1992)
Directed by John Woo
A cop who loses his partner in a shoot-out with gun smugglers goes on a mission to catch them. In order to get closer to the leaders of the ring he joins forces with an undercover cop who's working as a gangster hitman. They use all means of excessive force to find them.
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What critics compared Hard Boiled to
While not as operatic or elegant as John Woo’s output from that era, there are clear parallels and references to “Hard Boiled,” “Hard Target” and even his maligned “Mission: Impossible” sequel.
The Fate of the Furious saw Jason Statham decimate a plane’s worth of enemies à la Hard Boiled and The Rock push a torpedo away with his barehands; their cinematic match-up as a duo was inevitable.
At their best, face-offs in the first film brought to mind the fluid, balletic destruction of prime John Woo, particularly Hard Boiled , and select set-pieces in the follow-up do impress.
With The Raid 2 Evans has escalated action filmmaking the same way that the gun fu classics The Killer and Hard Boiled did back at the turn of the 1990s.
Think Hard Boiled, but in tighter spaces.
Writer-editor-director Gareth Huw Evans stages "The Raid's" 15 floors of mayhem as if he tossed "Hard Boiled," "Supercop" and "Die Hard" into a blender and hit purée.
When the wave of Hong Kong movies from masters such as John Woo (Better Tomorrow, The Killer and Hard Boiled) were making their international bones in the 1980s and early '90s, they brought wild creativity to the choreography of violence.
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Friend’s bland chrome-dome antihero dispatches hordes of enemies by twirling about while firing two steely pistols at once like some sort of third-rate Chow Yun-fat circa The Killer and Hard Boiled.
Such beautiful visual clarity extends to their action centerpieces, which balance graceful fluidity and ultra-violent gunplay and hand-to-hand combat in a way that would make even the maestro of pistols-and-punches mayhem, John Woo (The Killer, Hard Boiled), giddy with excitement.
The action is of course breath-taking, but John Woo manages to inject his spectacles with real emotion and meaning – something that Hollywood has struggled to replicate, barring titles such as “John Wick” (2014), and “The Raid” (2011).
This one enters the pantheon of great action cinema, next to Hard Boiled, The Raid, and Mad Max: Fury Road.
Is it beyond reason to nominate Keanu Reeves' unstoppable hit man John Wick as PETA Spokesperson of the Year, as well as, in no particular order, best successor to The Killer/Hard Boiled-era Chow Yun-fat mastery, and best-dressed, cordite-scented triggerman with a heart of cold crimson gold?
They have some of the best fight choreography since the heyday of the great Hong Kong shoot-em-ups like Hard Boiled or Full Contact elegant cinematography, and no-nonsense efficient characters and plot that propel everything forward without getting bogged down too much in details.
In fact, “Wasseypur” steadily builds momentum throughout its daunting five and a half hours, culminating with two spectacular action sequences, including a hospital shootout that could hold its own with John Woo’s “Hard Boiled.”
Schwentke aims for a John Woo-esque celebration of clever staging and stylish action, but we’re miles from “Hard Boiled” or “A Better Tomorrow” as sequences frequently have a falsely anarchic, been-there-done-that staleness about them (one in which Frank slides out of a spinning car, firing bullets without missing a beat is a brief exception).
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In the Mood for Love (Fa yeung nin wa) deals with the unrequited love that Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai of Hard Boiled fame) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung Man-yuk) feel for each other after discovering the adultery their spouses have been practicing.
The basic set-up - dead soldier brought back to life with false memories implanted so he'll kill who he's told and think it's all his idea - was stale when Bloodshot the comic ripped it off from Frank Miller and Geof Darrow's (far crazier) comic Hard Boiled, which itself was using a bunch of ideas left over from when Miller was writing the Robocop sequels.