Let’s get down to business: This film is fucking bananas. Not your average store-bought bananas, not even your farm-to-table free range bananas, this is 160 metric tonnes of high-explosive, slow-motion, dual pistol, Hong Kong bullet spraying bananas; shipped directly to you from the inner recesses of Director John Woo’s unfathomable id. Whatever Woo thought might be cool to put in an action-noir, this film got—and it does not disappoint.
Hard Boiled, released in 1992, is a symphony of chaos with no intermezzo, an opera with no human boundary, whose tenor, baritone, and bass, are woven together with gasoline and shattered glass. One might even observe that this film’s glass budget alone is probably half the GDP of Liberia. It’s the Citizen Kane of gun-fu, the Casablanca of shotgun ballet—without Hard Boiled, there could be no John Wick; controversial, but true.
This movie hit during the height of Hong Kong’s cinematic golden age, packed with late night neon signs, cigarette smoke, jazz clubs, and the kinds of gun-wielding badassery from a film industry pushing action cinema to it’s limits. Directors like Woo, Tsui Hark, and Ringo Lam, reimagined a stagnant genre that had been favoring braun over brains, and muscle over mastery. When Hard Boiled’s antagonist drops this knowledge: “In this world, the one holding the gun in the end—wins” he wasn’t wrong.
Since I’m writing this column to be real, I won’t bullshit you: There’s a plot, but it might not even matter. This film is just an excuse for continuous gunplay, bombastic explosions, and a body count so high you’ll lose track somewhere in the high triple digits. And that’s 100 percent OK.
Basically, a ruthless arms syndicate, run by Triad boss Jonny Wong, has been infiltrated by an origami folding undercover detective named Alan. He’s in deep; so deep, that he’s not even sure which side of the law he’s on anymore. But when an arms deal goes sideways and Tequila—a jazz clarinet-playing, go-for-broke cop—loses his partner, he and Alan are forced into a classic team up. Risking everything to take Wong’s syndicate down, they shed one bullet, one body at a time. That pretty much sums up the plot, a buddy cop movie on pure uncut methamphetamine.
Hard Boiled would be Woo’s last film before he landed on Hollywood like a thermonuclear explosion with classics like Hard Target, Face/Off, and Mission Impossible II. Coopted by Hollywood’s notoriously humorless studio system, this is the last time he would integrate the kinds of Hong Kong noir aesthetics, which make for great cinema. Nevertheless, its Woo’s ability to grapple with the moral ambiguity of of his protagonist cops that really stands out (cops are gonna cop, no matter where in the world they are)—Tequila is just as likely to blow up a tea house as he is to stroll into the next scene, casually playing jazz clarinet like he didn’t just kill 27 people.
Woo doesn’t just embrace this trope, he evolved it to it’s current form. Unlike Hollywood’s action heroes, there is no moral compass in Hard Boiled. Everyone lives in the grey.
This is where American and Chinese cop-noir diverge; Tequila and Alan are not brooding men of few words, but sharp-tongued, wise-cracking smart asses, whose physicality is not defined by muscles, but the unrelenting energy of a human bullet. While Tequila chafes under the authority of his superiors, he ultimately seeks to uphold their authority, not operate outside of it. He’s less lone wolf and more wrecking ball, crashing through the underworld with a badge, gun, and a true sense of institutional justice.
Hard Boiled also introduced the world to Chow Yun-fat, who would also come to Hollywood, staring in The Replacement Killers, directed by Antoine Fuqua (of Training Day fame), Anna and the King and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. None of which captured the same magic or gave him the scale to perform as he did in his earlier Hong Kong films.
Before we close out this week’s VHS club, let me pitch you on why this film is essential viewing: THE THIRD ACT. Holy hell, this ins’t just an action climax, it’s a sustained category-five hurricane of bullets, bombs, and babies—all of which takes place in a hospital. When Johnny Wong tells his henchmen, “Take the patients hostage,” we transcend this earthly plane and enter a world of pure unadulterated mayhem. Just to give an idea of scale: This sequence tops out at over 30 minutes and the production actually ran out of squibs (blood packs for gunshot effects) and Chow Yun-fat was nearly blinded when an explosive went off in his face—movie making perfection.
And just when you think Woo’s hit peak insanity—he ratchets it up one last time—by moving the gun-fight into a maternity ward full of newborn babies. Because why not? They just don’t make em’ like they used to.
If you’re interested in checking out more of John Woo’s Hong Kong-era films, we recommend the following: The Killer, A Better Tomorrow, and Once a Thief.
No VHS Club is complete without a playlist on our Spotify channel. Scroll to the bottom to find 15 songs from 1992 that will set the vibe for your Hard Boiled watch party.
VHS Club is a weekly expedition into the dark alleys and neon-lit backstreets of forgotten cinema history. Every other week we’ll revisit a film that still lurks in the culture, celebrating cult-classics, B-movie brilliance, and exploitation epics that are too métier for the overlords controlling our streaming platforms. These films come from our personal collection, living on those old tapes which can still be found in the back of thrift-stores and antique malls; passed around by cinephiles, horror heads, crime connoisseurs, and action junkies. Some are cinematic masterpieces, while others are just beautiful, glorious trash.
Let us know if there is a film you want reviewed for VHS Club by sending an email to hello@rvamag.com with VHS Club in the subject line.
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