Copyright 2000 www.cosmopolis.ch Louis Gerber All rights
reserved.
Hard Boiled
1992
Director: John Woo
Inspector Yuen: Chow Yun Fat
Tony (Alan): Tony Leung
Teresa Chang: Terese Mo
Detective Chan: Philip Chan
Mr. Woo: John Woo
Chow Yun Fat (The Replacement Killers) plays the role of inspector
Yuen, a man who has decided to crack down once and for all the syndicate of Hong Kong-based arms dealers. After months of undercover investigation
the situation escalates,
criminals and innocent people get killed and, above all, inspector Yuen has to
start his investigation all over again.
Yuen realizes that there is still an undercover agent working for the
police department. His boss gets secret messages through musical notes
delivered with bunches of flowers sent to a former girlfriend of Yuen's. The
melody is a hidden code for his superior. The undercover agent Tony (Tony
Leung) works for both sides but begins to chase the gangsters with Yuen. A
showdown in a hospital garantees a lot of action.
The quality of film-making is equal to Hollywood productions, especially on
the action and esthetic level. But the story - as always with John Wood - is
very thin. The plot and the characters are too simple. What saves the film is
a great actor: Chow Yun Fat. What a pity that this man is not fluent (yet) in
English. He could become a Hollywood superstar.
Director John Woo, biography
Hard Boiled
(1992) is a typical John Woo action movie. The director
was born in 1946 as Ng Yu-Sum in Guangzhou, in the Chinese province of Canton.
In the early 1950s his family (Christians) moved to Hong
Kong for religious reasons - Communist revolutionary pressure was severe. In Hong Kong John Woo's
father contracted TB and the big fire of 1953 destroyed
their home - the family was homeless for a while and had some hard times. Young
John Woo learned to appreciate cinema as a child. He left High School and joined
a youth theatre club that organized screenings of European movies and shot
little films. In the late 1960s, John Woo shot several 8mm and 16mm experimental
films. He got his first job in the film business in 1969 as script supervisor at
the Hong Kong based Cathay Studios. From 1971 on he worked for the Shaw Bros. and
their film studio. The martial-arts master Chang Cheh influenced him when he
worked as his assistant director. In 1973 he had his first chance to direct a film,
but it did not pass censorhip because it contained too much violence. The film was sold to the
Golden Harvest company and released two years later. Woo signed a contract and
began shooting films for them. The 1977-comedy The Pilferer's Progress
was a success and therefore a number of other comedies followed. After a series
of flops in the mid-1980s his career was in danger. When he went under contract
with producer and director Tsui Hark this changed. A Better Tomorrow was
his first film with him. It was a mix of
martial arts and film noir. It won in 1987
the Hong Kong Film Award as Best Picture and
established Leslie Cheung and Chow Yun Fat as action stars. A series of action
movies followed, among them Hard Boiled which won a Hong Kong Film Award for Best Film Editing
in 1992 and opened the road to Hollywood John Woo. There he worked with Jean-Claude Van Damme in Hard Target in 1993.
Among John Woo's more recent movies are Face Off, Mission Impossible and
soon to come: Mission Impossible II.
A
selection of awards won by John Woo 1996
Cine Asia Award: Life Time Achievement; 1993 Hong Kong Film Award: Best Film
Editing for Hard Boiled; 1991 Hong Kong Film Award: Best Film Editing for
Bullet in the Head; 1990 Hong Kong Film Award: Best Director for The
Killer; 1987 Hong Kong Film Award: Best Picture for A Better Tomorrow;
etc.
Get Hard Boiled on DVD from Amazon.co.uk,
Amazon.fr
(A toute épreuve; 2 DVDs). [August 11, 2003: currently out of stock at
Amazon.com, Directmedia.ch].
