This summer, MovieJawn is counting down our 25 favorite action movies of all time! We will be posting a new entry each day! See the whole list so far here.

by Tessa Swehla, Associate Editor

I met a very dear friend of mine through the social media platform formerly known as Twitter by posting a gif from the John Woo directed Mission Impossible 2 (2000) of Tom Cruise and Dougray Scott launching themselves in the air at each other from their respective motorcycles. I captioned the gif: “Does anyone want to love to hate me this much and be my nemesis?” An acquaintance volunteered in the comments, and thus, a friendship was born.

This article isn’t about Mission Impossible 2, but it illustrates an aspect of why Woo’s iconic action films have such a devoted audience. Woo has a knack for imbuing his action with primal emotions: love, hate, obsession, grief, anger, fear. In many ways, the action is the emotion. Nowhere is this more true than in Woo’s greatest action opus–and #2 on MovieJawn’s Action Movie Countdown–Hard Boiled (1992). 

Side note: Let me just get this out of the way: Face/Off will always be his most famous film in the US, but before he began making American films, Hard Boiled was already a masterpiece. It’s his best. End of story.

The premise of this movie is fairly straightforward. Cynical cop “Tequila” Yuen (Chow Yun-fat)–we are given no other first name other than his nickname–has been after gangsters for most of his career. After his partner is killed in action, Tequila seeks revenge against Triad leader and gun smuggler Johnny Wong (Anthony Wong), but he is stopped by enforcer Alan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai). Intrigued by this mysterious new player on the scene, Tequila investigates Alan, only to discover that he is an undercover cop. Despite the differences in their methods and in their goals, Tequila and Alan must work together, even as the odds against them mount.

Woo had become famous in Hong Kong for making films about gangsters, a trend that inevitably got him criticism from the “won’t someone think of the children” brigade. For Woo, Hard Boiled was a way to address the criticism by making an action movie about the police. Is this copaganda? Absolutely. But at the end of the day, the “cops and robbers” set-up of the film feels more like a pretext for the indulgent (complimentary) high octane action fantasy that Hard Boiled really is. Woo chooses instead to focus on the ways in which these characters perform their masculinity through their respective roles as cops and gangsters. And, you know, lots of really cool gunfights.

Despite Woo’s original intent for this movie to be more gritty and less flashy than his previous ventures, this movie quickly becomes a no-holds-barred exercise in just how far action can be pushed. The movie starts with an extended sequence featuring a shootout at a bird-themed tea house, which immediately features such Woo-isms as: men dual-wielding pistols, sliding down staircases while shooting, and lots and lots of flying and fluttering birds. This scene is described afterwards by Tequila’s police captain as “give a man a gun, and he thinks he’s superman. Give him two and he thinks he’s a god,” and that’s where the movie starts. 

There are only really four action set-pieces in this film: the bird cafe, the warehouse, Alan’s houseboat, and the hospital, and that hospital sequence takes up most of the final half of the film. Woo’s ability to draw out these scenes over an extended period of time allows both the thrill and the emotional stakes to develop like photographs in a darkroom. Almost all of the effects are done practically or in camera, lending them weight and heft despite the heightened style. The sets almost have as much personality as the actors, and Woo and his crew cram each moment and each scene with as much visual storytelling as they possibly can, rendering the film infinitely rewatchable.

Tequila and Alan’s relationship is the heart of this film. I wrote about Hard Boiled as part of an article on doubled masculine characters in Woo’s filmography for MovieJawn’s Fall 2023 print zine, so I won’t re-tread those themes here. What I will say is that Chow and Leung’s chemistry elevates the action of this movie to new heights. Yes, Woo does have a (wonderful) tendency to write homoerotic masculine relationships with strong feelings of love or hate (or hate so strong it feels like love), but in the warehouse battle scene where Alan and Tequila point their guns at each other point blank, it’s Leung who makes the choice to tenderly caress Tequila’s face with the muzzle of his gun before decocking. It’s Chow that snarls in the frustration of losing his prey, both literally and metaphorically. We’ve seen this scene played out many, many times in Woo’s films but never this tender or raw. He encases them with the almost overwhelming sound of their own breathing and with smoke from the explosions and gunfire around them. They have met briefly once before, but this is their true meet-cute, when they really see each other for what they are: Alan sees Tequila as someone who could be the partner he has never had, and Tequila sees that Alan is not a gangster but a cop like him.

These iconographic moments of action tell us everything we need to know about how these characters feel. Another stand-out moment is in the hospital during a particularly brilliant almost three minute long-take when, to quote myself, “the way they move around each other feels more like a choreographed dance, each innately understanding where they are and where their partner is…more is said in a quick glance than in entire conversations in other action films.” And, of course, no one smokes a cigarette onscreen like Leung.

Every time I watch this film, I notice new details, and on this most recent rewatch, I noticed Philip Kwok. While probably best known in the US for his role as General Chang in Tomorrow Never Dies (dir. Roger Spottiswoode, 1997), Kwok was already a veteran martial arts actor and stuntman in Hong Kong cinema, having performed in films since the mid-seventies. I didn’t know much about him prior to watching this film, but Kwok’s performance as Mad Dog, one of Johnny Wong’s main henchmen, is a true standout in this film. To my surprise, I discovered that Woo originally hired Kwok to be the action director/stunt coordinator on Hard Boiled but decided to also have him play the role of Mad Dog after seeing him perform some of the stunts for the film, in order to increase the physical obstacles that Tequila and Alan must face. It would be very easy for this role to be lost in the bombastic noise of Hard Boiled, but Kwok is able to bring the exact right amount of menace, competence, and conflict to this character who can believably outfight both Alan and Tequila even when they are working together.

I could keep going. Tequila MacGyvers a sealed vault door using handcuffs and gunpowder. Alan folds a crane every time he kills someone in the name of the job. There is an extended sequence in the hospital involving the evacuation of the infants in the PICU that culminates in one of the funniest visual gags to ever happen in an action film. Woo’s legacy as one of the action greats cements him a place on this list, but it is this film that earns him second place on this action countdown.