Any ten seconds of Hard Boiled action is cooler than some entire movies

Watching Firestorm got me in a Woo mood, and around the time Tequila unsheathed his shotgun with a flourish, I realized Hard Boiled is a modern-crime wuxia. Not a Revanchist gun-wuxia, but a transplant of those classic archetypes, choreography, themes to the era of cops & Triads

Woo infused Hard Boiled’s set-pieces with the dynamic choreography, shapes, and impacts of classic kung-fu/wuxia, now with guns instead of swords. The imitators never seemed to quite capture that aspect outside of Equilibrium’s gun-kata and John Wick’s gun-jitsu

The dives and rolls and slides act as the modern-day equivalents of wire-leaps and trampoline-hops, all while Woo builds upon the heroic bloodshed, battle honor, and brotherhoods that Chang Cheh brought to his period action.

Revanchist took that “modern wuxia with guns” even further into Siu-Tung-esque extremes, but I feel like Woo did it best and most elegantly (and explosively!) with Hard Boiled https://twitter.com/HeadExposure/status/1274848753166553089