Hard Boiled
Shoot Em Up
•
2h 8m
Hard Boiled (Chinese: 辣手神探) is a 1992 Hong Kong action film directed by John Woo and from a screenplay by Barry Wong. The film stars Chow Yun-fat as Inspector "Tequila" Yuen, Tony Leung Chiu-wai as Alan, an undercover cop, and Anthony Wong as Johnny Wong, a leader of the criminal triads.
The film was John Woo's last Hong Kong film before his transition to Hollywood. After making films that glamorized gangsters and receiving criticism for doing so, Woo wanted to make a Dirty Harry styled film to glamorize the police. With the death of screenwriter Barry Wong, the film's screenplay underwent constant changes during filming. New characters such as Mad Dog and Mr. Woo were introduced, while the original plotline of a baby-poisoning psychopath was cut.
Hard Boiled was released in Hong Kong in 1992 to generally positive audience reception, but was not as commercially successful as Woo's previous films such as A Better Tomorrow and The Killer. Reception from Western critics was much more positive, with many critics and film scholars describing its action scenes as being among the best ever filmed. In 2007, a video game sequel titled Stranglehold was released.
Up Next in Shoot Em Up
-
Inglourious Bastards
Inglourious Basterds is a 2009 war film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, starring Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger and Mélanie Laurent. The film tells an alternate history story of two plots to assassinate Nazi Germany's...
-
Atomic Blonde
Atomic Blonde is a 2017 American action thriller film based on the 2012 graphic novel The Coldest City, which revolves around a spy who has to find a list of double agents that is being smuggled into the West on the eve of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The film is directed by David Lei...
-
The Searchers
The Searchers is a 1956 American Technicolor VistaVision epic Western film directed by John Ford, based on the 1954 novel by Alan Le May, set during the Texas–Indian wars, and starring John Wayne as a middle-aged Civil War veteran who spends years looking for his abducted niece (Natalie Wood), ac...
