As a teenager, I was a huge fan of action films. This was the late 1980s to early 1990s, so Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Segal ruled the cinema. Every new film had to have bigger explosions, bigger guns, and bigger one-liners. I loved them until I didn’t. At some point in college, I’d had enough. Bigger just wasn’t doing it for me anymore. Directors like Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh had shown me you could make movies with violence and still be smart about it. A clever script and sharp directing trumped explosions every time.
Buy Hard Boiled 4K UHDThere were exceptions, and John Woo’s 1997 film Face/Off, with John Travolta and Nic Cage, was one of them. The plot was utterly ridiculous (Travolta’s FBI agent literally swaps faces with Cage’s terrorist), but the action was operatic and beautiful, and the two leads are clearly having a lot of fun. For some reason, this didn’t lead me to diving into John Woo’s filmography. It didn’t help that his follow-up film was Mission: Impossible 2, which I found to be dreadful at the time.
But in the (many) years since, I have started to dig into Woo’s back catalog and the world of Hong Kong action cinema, and it has been a delight. Perhaps his best film is 1992’s Hard Boiled. Chow Yun-Fat stars as a cop who teams up with an undercover agent (Tony Leung) posing as an assassin for a group of gangsters in order to take revenge on the guys who killed his partner. But much like Face/Off, the plot here is just a mechanism to bring us some spectacular action. Nobody shoots a shoot-out like John Woo, and he never did it better than in Hard Boiled.
Shout Factory is giving Hard Boiled the 4K treatment and has loaded three discs full of extras, including interviews, commentaries, and deleted scenes. Picture me diving across the DVD aisles in slow motion while a pack of doves flies away as I purchase this thing on release date and make it my Pick of the Week.
Also out this week that looks interesting:
Outland 4K UHD: Sean Connery stars in this science fiction film from Peter Hyams as a marshal trying to solve a murder on one of Jupiter’s moons. Arrow Video has the UHD release and has filled it with lots of extras.
The Breakfast Club 4K UHD: John Hughes’s best film is about a group of misfits spending one long Saturday in detention learning that maybe they aren’t so different after all. Criterion has the release. Read Steve Geise’s review of Criterion’s Blu-ray.
Vampires 4K UHD: A vampire western directed by John Carpenter should have been amazing; instead, it’s just pretty good. It is stylish and gritty, but you can tell the director’s heart just isn’t in it. Still, there is enough for fans to enjoy, and now you can do so in UHD from Shout Factory. You can read my review of their older Blu-ray release.
