Hard Boiled 
 

PostED ON 18.10.2025

It's brutal. If you wanted to count the number of gunshots fired in this film, you'd give up in defeat after just four minutes. Hard Boiled is the last film John Woo shot in Hong Kong, as if the director wanted to give himself one last burst of glory before setting up his camera in Hollywood. 

© DR
À toute épreuve (1992)

The storyline is convincing: a kind-hearted police officer on one side (the charismatic Chow Yun-Fat), an arms dealer on the other, and in the middle an undercover agent (Tony Leung) whose allegiances are unclear.

Dialogues interspersed with orders to shut up, mildly salacious jokes, chases, shootouts - on motorbikes, in helicopters - with weapons of all calibres, paint a picture of Hong Kong in the hands of the triads, a reality in the early 1990s. ‘Within a few months, our entire society was being devoured from the inside by a perfectly organised and totally uncontrollable criminal network’, the filmmaker recounts. ‘At the same time, the events of the Gulf War steered my attention towards the notion of lawless arms dealers.’

Behind the scenes, John Woo pursued his idea of paying tribute to Dirty Harry, with Tequila Yuen (Chow Yun-fat) as his little brother from Hong Kong. The film quietly found an audience, but critics denounced its ‘hardcore violence’, which the filmmaker dismissed, retorting, ‘It's never senseless and always carries a different meaning’. A few months later, crime rates skyrocketed, validating John Woo's scenario. The Hong Kong mafia, denounced in Hard Boiled, even attempted to take control of the film industry, resorting to threats and assassinations of people in the business. 

Carlos Gomez

Hard Boiled by John Woo (Lashou shentan, 1992, 2h08, int -12ans)

UGC Confluence Sat. 18 at 4.30 pm