Hard Boiled (1992)

John Woo's Hard Boiled arrives from 1992, a Hong Kong action picture made in the twilight of the director's local period before he decamped for Hollywood. The plot concerns Inspector Tequila Yuen, a clarinet-playing alcoholic with a habit of defying his superiors, and Alan, an undercover officer posing as a Triad assassin who folds an origami crane after each killing. Their paths converge over a gun-smuggling syndicate and a vault hidden beneath a hospital. Then comes a great deal of gunfire.

The picture carries no social program. Its cast is entirely Asian because the film is set in Hong Kong, not as a gesture toward inclusion. The bond between Tequila and Alan is homosocial in the older sense, two men who understand each other through shared violence, and the screenplay never converts that into anything more current. Teresa Chang is a capable officer who decodes messages and rescues infants from a maternity ward, and the film asks nothing of her beyond competence. There is no environmental lament, no critique of wealth, no meditation on the body, no diagnosis of the mind. The criminals are criminals, and the police are police.

Woo reportedly conceived the film after critics accused him of romanticizing gangsters, and his response was to make a police picture modeled on Dirty Harry. That is an artistic correction, not a moral lecture. The hospital sequence, a five-minute take stitched together under exhaustion, remains the film's argument: technique as spectacle, carnage as choreography. Nothing in it instructs the viewer on how to live. For a certain kind of audience this will read as a deficiency. For this critic it reads as a clean ledger, and the ledger is empty.