Lets face it, the 80’s sucked. The decade that gave us polar necks, a recession and Tom Selleck-moustaches didn’t treat us too kindly when it came to cinema. Despite giving us some memorable hair (see: Patrick Swayze) and enough testosterone fuelled follies to last, well, a month or two, ultimately for every ravishing Raging Bull there was a dismal Driving Miss Daisy. They even had two spindly runners beat full-time archaeologist/geezer Indiana Jones at the Oscars.
The 90’s needed start with a bang and who better to provide it than the Hong Kong-master himself, John Woo. After coming to the attention of Hollywood with his gangster epic A Better Tomorrow, Woo was criticised for glamorising the underworld. His response, Hard Boiled – a stylised 80’s film and certainly more ‘Hollywood’ is superior to A Better Tomorrow - switches its attention to the world of undercover police with riveting results.
At the turn of the decade guns are being smuggled into Hong Kong by rival Triad gangs. Hero-cop Tequila (Yun Fat) is the cop assigned with the mission of bringing this racket down and when his partner is gunned down during a blistering opening scene in a restaurant, it becomes a personal vendetta.
When it’s revelled that the police already have an undercover agent, Tony, (Leung) infiltrating both gangs, Tequila and Tony join forces to take down crime lord Johnny.
The opening itself is a tour de force from an exuberant Woo. Flash-pans, slow-mo, freeze-frames, the opening barrage and indeed most of the films set pieces bring Peckinpah into the late 20th century with nuclear-esque explosions. Never has there been such an exhilarating opening.
As double-cross’s follow and rival gangs become one supra-gang, Tequila continues the only way he knows how: if you can’t beat them, shoot them.
And shoot them he does. The loquacious violence, as brutal as it is, feels orchestrated and balletic. Woo jolts the camera around a warehouse shootout like a music video, bullets and bodies flying everywhere all to the sounds of a fast tempo synth-based soundtrack. It’s not mindless violence, it’s meticulous and operatic as though Chow Yun Fat is conducting the orchestra with an uzi.
The finale, all twenty-five minutes of it, is a spectacle in itself. Bandleader Johnny has cunningly stashed his arsenal of weapons in a hospital giving cinema one of it’s greatest shoot-outs and some innovative uses of hospital beds.
Hard Boiled does strike up similarities with other action-masterpiece Die Hard. Bruce Willis’ John Mclane is the parallel of Yun Fat’s Tequila. Both are renegade police with an insatiable love for what they do and no matter what happens you know that the end these hard-arses will walk off into the sunset virtually unscathed. What makes Hard Boiled the better experience is that it mixes what was bad about the 80’s and somehow manages to transcend caricature and in doing so becomes more visceral. And Tequila could totally have Mclane!
No comments:
Post a Comment