Hacker Cinema
Hard Boiled
辣手神探
1992 · Film · 126 min
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.
5 positivefrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
A great example of this is Hard Boiled 1992, the Hospital Shootout.
I think audiences are beginning to appreciate continuous scenes and are becoming more frequent in western films. The most recent one I can think of is John Wick 4, when it goes top down.
Some of the recent Michael Bay movies are so aggressive when it comes to cuts, the average shot length must be 2 or 3 seconds.
This brought memories back for me, years ago there was a small VHS store that stocked a lot of these. Looking at there catalog is like a trip down memory lane. List of there titles I saw many years ago. (Pretty much all great movies) A Tale of Two Sisters Audition Battle Royale 1 + 2 Chaos Dead Or Alive 1 + 2 Gozu Happiness of the Katakuris, The Hard Boiled Infernal Affairs: The Trilogy Lady Vengeance Oldboy R-Point Ring Trilogy Save the Green Planet Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance Tetsuo: The Iron Man Visitor Q
As mentioned in the article a lot of people in the UK were introduced to a certain brand of Asian cinema via 'Tartan Asia Extreme'.
I was no different. As a student I'd venture into the tiny world cinema section of HMV and flick through the titles looking for anything that had the 'TARTAN ASIA EXTREME' branding on it.
So many fantastic movies in the collection [1]. Oldboy, Battle Royale, Dark Water, Hard Boiled, Ring, Infernal Affairs, Audition, etc.
1: https://www.benoakley.co.uk/tartan-asia-extreme
I'm 29 and loved 2001, for what it's worth. It's not really just age, I don't think. I remember showing college friends Hard-Boiled (the John Woo film starring Chow Yun Fat) and they all got bored and stopped watching. Meanwhile I'm wondering how anyone could find a scene where there's a shootout involving guys on motorcycles with machine guns not to be simulating enough. I guess the mind of the cineaste works differently.
On the other hand, I watched High Sierra recently and the pre-Bullit notion of a car chase scene was, uh, less than thrilling.
I can see where you're coming from (both involve crime, intrigue, cops and robbers), but I don't think it's really same genre.
Don't get me wrong, on its own terms The Killer is an amazing film, basically defining the heroic bloodshed action genre, and together with Hard Boiled and A Better Tomorrow among the three must-see John Woo movies.