| | Hong Kong action stars Chow Yun Fat and Tony Leung team up with director John Woo for a movie of nearly non-stop, incredibly orchestrated gun battles. The plot, as usual in these Hong Kong action flicks, is a mostly disposable, lightly played thing, casting Yun Fat as unflappable police inspector "Tequila," out to bust a gun smuggling ring operating out of an unlikely vault in the basement of a hospital.
Gun smuggling was a brilliant choice, as it gives Woo every excuse to keep the bullets and guns flying. When Tequila empties a clip (which doesn't happen nearly as often as it should based on how much lead he's putting out), he doesn't reload; he just switches guns. In fact, there's only one guy who has to reload on a regular basis, and that proves to be his Waterloo.
Woo and Yun Fat show a real signature style here. In their hands, gunfights become a complicated, bloody ballet, in which firing as much as possible while jumping around may not help you hit your target, but it certainly looks cool. There is some slow-motion, but much of the action takes place at full speed, with bullets and bodies flying every which way, almost faster than you can keep up with. How many gunmen can they pack into a Hong Kong hospital? A lot. A whole lot.
The characters are cartoonish, but memorable, and the hyperbolic gunfire is coordinated with real creative flair (dig the dude firing an Uzi (or whatever) as he skids along sideways on the side of a motorcycle). You just don't find this volume of full-speed action in today's CG-dominated, bullet-time-obsessed action flicks, and that's really too bad--at least when it was done this well. The body count in Hard Boiled goes through the stratosphere and makes modern action movies look like pansies by comparison. |
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