John Woo’s Hard Boiled opens with the best shoot-out ever
Hollywood’s action genre owes a massive debt to John Woo. The Face/Off and The Killer director had his breakthrough with 1986’s A Better Tomorrow, whose stylized gun-fu sensibilities subverted expectations associated with Hong Kong’s martial arts-saturated action scene back then. Stylized gunfights and operatic choreography soon became a part of Woo’s signature artistry, along with the effective use of slow-motion and multiple angles to convey a sense of urgency. In 1992, this specific genre of action filmmaking (termed “heroic bloodshed”) led to Woo’s critically-acclaimed Hard Boiled, featuring an iconic buddy-cop routine with a no-nonsense detective and a morally ambiguous undercover agent.
