InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 6

enemies. Woo doesn't film this to show off the stunt, but instead employs a staggering amount of cuts — almost 20 times in 20
seconds. Chow is smooth in this sequence while surrounded by bodies hitting the floor; sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, always
violently.
But Woo is a master of melodrama as much as he is of action. As with his lyrical and elegiac The Killer and his later heroic Hollywood
efforts Broken Arrow and the flat-out awesome Face/Off, and even in his unfairly-derided Mission: Impossible II (which, while neutered,
is still replete with Woo-ist touches), there's a theme of duality, of partnership and friendship and the depths of bromance, on which
the extraordinary set-pieces of Hard Boiled are founded. Chow and Leung have better chemistry than any leads in any romantic
comedy of the last 20 years, with riotous raillery and a palpable sense of unity and determination to get the baddies. (It’s easy to go
back and forth between The Killer, which is more soulful and tragic, and Hard Boiled, which is a triumphant, more formally daring
affair. In true Woo fashion, they are an inextricable pair, two embodiments of the same passions and vision.)
Woo’s films are also always concerned with morality, but there are no cumbersome lessons; the juxtaposition between cop and
criminal, good and evil, redemption and damnation is gunmetal gray. All of which is to say, there's poetry in Woo’s violence, as when
Chow plugs a baby's ears with cotton and lights up so many men, all of their blasted bodies bursting into blood and viscera as the
baby gazes with gleaming goo-goo eyes. So while Chow can deliver a stony-eyed glare as well as anyone, Woo unburdens his films of
the self-severity and stoicism of modern action. Instead, he makes friendship and masculinity and morality and heroism and the
ravaging of human bodies by metal projectiles oddly, alluringly beautiful. — GREG CWIK