The Greatest Action Movie EVER MADE Back In Print!

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Cosmoline

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If you're one of those unfortunates who thinks Die Hard is the end all and be all of action films, you're in dire need of a Fat injection. The Hong Kong classic "Hard Boiled" is finally back out on DVD after a protracted period of absence. This is good news, because I wore out my old copy long ago.

It has the longest single shootout sequence I know of, and a body count that would make Tarantino blush. There is nothing to touch it stateside. Even if actors were willing to work inches from live squibs and real explosions, the underwriters would never allow it here. There is no CGI in this film. No green screen FX. No fancy editing. When you see an actor enveloped in flame, he's actually getting enveloped in flame. The only thing that isn't real is the bullets. They made the whole thing for a few million with mob financing. Woo, who had been developing a style of ballet-like shootouts in earlier films, brought that to fruition here. Everything from motorcycle dismounts to the draw of a shotgun is done with the precision of a dance step. It's amazing stuff. Copied many, many times by Hollywood but never equaled.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000N4SHNK/twitch-20

Just a clip, from the cruddy first release. Can't wait to see the remastered one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAg5SXD-oE4

And all that is BEFORE Fat appears.
 
When this came out (in the heady days before suburban grandmas knew who Jackie Chan was), it was so over the top it was unbelievable!
We saw it when it was new at a college screening presented by John Woo himself ( a very soft spoken and shy guy).

It was very interesting when he explained he edited the pacing of the gunfight scenes to existing music to keep them flowing and rhythmic, and I kid you not, he said he used show tunes. One example he gave was using the music from Seven Brides For Seven Brothers!

I laugh when I recall the P.C. student who just had to smugly ask whether he felt the violence in his films was helping to create a violent society. He answered that his reality was seeing a man shot in the head in front of his house when he was growing up in Hong Kong, and that his films are based in that world, far from American college campuses.

The student shut up and sat down. :D
 
... i like chow yun fat a lot (I'm actually convinced that I'm distantly related to him) but i really dont like the move hard boiled.

too much suspension of disbelief. then again, i dont like most john woo movies.

my favorite war movie will be the first one that shows a WWII soldier cleaning the corrosive salts out of his rifle.

kev
 
After years of gunboard hype I rented it. Bad acting, writing, and direction. It truly does have it all. Between that and MI2 I now avoid anything that Woo is involved in. Maybe the book is better.
 
I always thought Woo was repetitive and overrated, couldn't stand the doves and spinning around and shooting, etc. Bruce Willis is a fan, he had this to say recently while promoting Die Hard 4:
"John Woo rocks. Especially with Hard-Boiled. That movie is on my heavy-rotation list. And Chow Yun Fat is the Boss of ass-whoopin'."
I liked Philip Kwok's (aka Kuo Chui) performance in Hard Boiled, he was the Lizard in the 5 Deadly Venoms.
 
Well, I've got a Hong-Kong ebay special of it...

Along with A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Bullet in the Head. Looking for A Better Tomorrow II.

I've got a Killer poster in The Bunker.

The Fat characters could kick ass on both Chuck Norris and Jack Bauer.

Of course, the other night, I watched a Sammo Hung flick... That big guy can move...
 
This is a shoot out fantasy. It's not meant to be realistic it's eye candy. As in "Sin City"...
 
No sich tang yeti Gwangdongwah
Click to expand...

is that "aiiigh, a yeti is pummeling me"?
Click to expand...

actually it's

"Ai-Yah, a yeti is pummeling me!"

hehehe reminds me of Firefly, where the "Chinese" is so badly mangled and forced into western speech patterns that I have to keep repeating to myself, "What you are hearing is not Chinese. It is the product of generations of a space-faring people that have evolved their own polyglot out from a Sino-European base."

especially awful were Walsh's chinese exclamatories which basically sounded like, "Ching Chang Wah Chong Ning Dah!" and would leave all the chinese people in the room scratching their heads and loyally struggling to make sense of it.
 
The Fat characters could kick ass on both Chuck Norris and Jack Bauer.
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Maybe. But Eastwood would eat him for breakfast. Hail Eastwood.

Hard Boiled is totally unbelievable. Not in the "hey, that guy's been shooting on full auto for five minutes" sense, but in the "My God, they just gunned down twenty innocent hospital patients... is that legal in a movie?" sense.
 
Some of you are completely missing the point. It's not supposed to be realistic. It's an action movie, not a drama or a war movie. Realistic shootouts are nasty, brutish and short. Wu's shootouts are high art, or at least they were before Sillywood got ahold of him.

"My God, they just gunned down twenty innocent hospital patients... is that legal in a movie?"
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LOL. Or "He just killed ten men while holding two babies!" It just doesn't get any better than that.
 
Woo-Hooey

Woo is wewy owewwated.

I saw some of his HK stuff & then some of his US stuff. Bleh. I want my money back. Maybe I saw all his suck-azz stuff & I, through some mechanism, have missed all his good flicks.

Hey, it coulda happened.

-------

OTOH, The Wild Bunch is a good candidate for greatest.

If you're an oriento-phile who must worship at the feet of east asian film makers, Maybe The Magnificent Seven will do for you.

If you want to divide it into decades, here are some nominations:
1940 Treasure of the Sierra Madre
1950 Bridge Over the River Kwai
1960 The Wild Bunch (Tough call, the 60's had a lot of good ones)
1970 Dirty Harry
1980 Raiders of the Lost Ark
1990 Heat (Another tough call, what with Ronin, Reservoir Dogs, LA Confidential & others)
2000 Man on Fire

I am defining an action movie as a movie where small groups of guys shoot at each other in way that does not make it either a war movie (MTW) or a cowboy movie or a scifi movie or a sword & sandal epic.
 
There's at least one firearms related thing in the movie that is accurate, and that's when at the end of the movie, the main bad guy shows his contempt toward the surrounding RHKPD (Royal Hong Kong Police Department): "humpph [they are carrying only] .38s"

Otherwise, the movie had a lot of gun porn which was state of the art at the time, including the Calico 9mm machine pistol, HK MP-5s, the bulpup AK, and of course the "load on Sunday and shoot all week" Berettas.
 
Whoa, looks sweet. I don't mind suspending belief and just having a good time. Have to look into it.

Cosmoline said:
Realistic shootouts are nasty, brutish and short.
Click to expand...
I guess that's just the "nature" of the beast...:p
 
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