A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #9: John Woo’s Hard-​Boiled.

John Woo must like Jazz clubs, because both The Killer and Hard-​Boiled fea­ture them, with Woo mak­ing a cameo as the club bar­tender in Hard-​Boiled. Rarely have I seen a film with a body count as high as Hard-​Boiled. The influ­ence of Melville’s Le Samouraï is still appar­ent, [birds in cages, jazz club] but the vivac­ity of Hong Kong cul­ture once again takes prece­dence. The char­ac­ters and plot are basic action movie fare, com­plete with a tough cop that doesn’t play by the rules, a mega­lo­ma­niac gang boss and rather blunt cri­tiques of bureau­cracy, but while it has the same sort of humor and destruc­tion as Die Hard, there is also a strong sense of wish-​fulfillment that isn’t quite as obvi­ous to me in Amer­i­can action films.

What I mean is that films like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon are about how Amer­i­cans see them­selves, cock­sure and tough as nails, a tra­di­tional retelling of What it Means to Be an Amer­i­can. In Hong Kong action, on the other hand, those traits are promi­nent but ulti­mately sec­ondary to the emer­gent culture’s need to define What it Means to Be a Hong Kong Chi­nese. Thus we get Tequila Yuen’s [Chow Yun-​Fat] trou­bles with his boss/​girlfriend Theresa and his dif­fi­culty in being able to afford a decent place to live despite being a sergeant on the police force, Tony/Alan’s desire for a pri­vate place on Guam, and Theresa desire to have a child despite being a hard work­ing woman. Even Johnny the Triad boss’s search for power reflects a young cul­ture wrestling with an old one.

So Hard-​Boiled rings with poignancy at odd times, even dur­ing the midst of whole­sale slaugh­ter, when Tony and Mad Dog allow some hos­pi­tal patients to escape before fight­ing, only to have them mown down by the gang boss who has tossed aside all pre­tenses of cul­tural sophis­ti­ca­tion to feed his ambi­tion. So ambi­tion is con­sid­ered a virtue [for the cops], but not when it runs over other peo­ple [the Triad boss]. I’d con­trast this to Amer­i­can action films which pre­serve the sta­tus quo. The char­ac­ters are focused on their imme­di­ate sit­u­a­tion and not really on long term goals exter­nal to it. The mes­sage is “do what needs to be done now, and don’t think about the future” as com­pared to Hong Kong’s “do what needs to be done now, so we can focus on the impor­tant things.”

I’d prob­a­bly say that Ang Lee’s Crouch­ing Tiger, Hid­den Dragon is the mature expres­sion of the new Chinese/​Hong Kong cul­ture, and one that prob­a­bly man­ages to rec­on­cile that ambi­tion with the ancient tra­di­tions. I’d say that The Killer is a bet­ter film than Hard-​Boiled, but Hard-​Boiled is more fun to watch.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Bar­bara Schar­res
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.