Hard Boiled (4K UHD Review)
Director
John WooRelease Date(s)
1992 (November 4, 2025)Studio(s)
Golden Princess Film Production/Milestone Pictures (Shout! Studios – Hong Kong Cinema Classics #17)- Film/Program Grade: A-
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: B
- Extras Grade: A-
Review
When John Woo set out to make Hard Boiled (aka Lat sau san taam) in 1992, he may or may not have known that it would end up being his swan song to the world of Hong Kong New Wave filmmaking, but either way, he still pulled out all the stops like a man possessed. Hard Boiled amplifies everything that he had already done in crime films like A Better Tomorrow, Bullet in the Head, and The Killer, raising it exponentially and taking the action to such ridiculous extremes that only a visionary genius like Woo could have possibly made all of it work. If Hard Boiled wasn’t an intentional swan song, it certainly summed up everything that made a John Woo film into a John Woo film.
Unsurprisingly, Hollywood came a-calling, so Woo made the leap across the Pacific and left Hard Boiled behind him as his ultimate thesis statement. Of course, Hollywood can be a fickle mistress, and Woo quickly discovered that they wanted him to give up the kind of creative freedom that he had enjoyed in his homeland. Eventually, he gave up on Hollywood completely and returned to Hong Kong in 2007, but that was also a return to his wuxia roots with the two-part historical epic Red Cliff. He’s made crime films since then, and even ping-ponged back across the ocean to direct an English-language remake of The Killer, but Hard Boiled remains his definitive statement on the genre.
And yet... definitive statement or not, Hard Boiled is still something of an inversion of Woo’s previous crime films. He was getting a bit tired of glorifying the Hong Kong underworld, and he was also disturbed by the fact that real-world thugs like Yip Kai-foon were leading a burgeoning wave of violent armed robberies using automatic weapons. All of that informed the story of Hard Boiled, both in terms of the narrative and the narrative structure. Gun runners would be the villains, but for once, the leads would be the police officers who were hunting them down. Woo still found a way to incorporate one of his patented unholy duos (or an unholy trinities, if you count the main villain) by having one of the officers be an undercover cop, and one who was so deep undercover that he was having a difficult time staying on the right side of the law.
Getting to that point wasn’t easy, however. Woo’s original story was a riff on Dirty Harry, with lead cop Tequila (Chow Yun-fat) being a badass who insisted on doing things his own way, rules be damned. But as the script developed through multiple drafts by Barry Wong, Gordon Chan, and Chan Hing-Ka (the latter two working uncredited), he ended up with an opposite number in the form of Alan (Tony Leung), who even Tequila doesn’t realize at first is actually an undercover cop. Alan has been pretending to work for mob boss Uncle Hoi (Kwan Hoi-San), but to trace the source of illegal gun smuggling, he shifts to working under Johnny Wong (Anthony Wong) instead. Superintendent Pang (Phillip Chan) orders Tequila to back off in order to protect Alan, but Tequila’s doesn’t listen, which turns up the heat between Alan, Johnny, and Johnny’s brutal enforcer Mad Dog (Phillip Kowk). It also leads to the hospital that Johnny has been using as cover for the gun smuggling, with the police on one side and the criminals on the other—and with Tequila, Alan, Tequila’s girlfriend Teresa (Teresa Mo), and a whole bunch of innocent babies caught in the middle.
Those babies were also part of the evolving nature of Hard Boiled, with Woo originally wanting the villain to be someone who poisons baby food—a concept that even he ultimately rejected. The story evolved so much, so quickly, that the film ended up going into production without a finished script. But while might have proved disastrous in the world of Hollywood filmmaking, Woo’s career in Hong Kong was marked by his gift for improvisation. His action scenes were usually invented on the fly without being meticulously storyboarded in advance. That may be difficult to believe given how perfectly that all his shots cut together in the final film, but Woo always cut everything together in his head while he was shooting, and it helped that he served as one of the actual film editors on Hard Boiled during post-production. He always got the results that he wanted, even when he was making everything up as he went along.
All three of the major set pieces in Hard Boiled were largely improvised: the teahouse massacre at the beginning; the confrontation between Uncle Hoi’s and Johnny’s crews in the middle; and the hospital shootout at the end. “At the end” might be selling the finale short, however, since the whole hospital sequence runs for the last 40 minutes of the film. There’s nothing else quite like it in all of Woo’s filmography, and if he really did pull out all the stops for Hard Boiled as a whole, they’re all visible during that last 40 minutes. It’s the single most sustained action set piece that he’s ever crafted, and with those creative juices flowing, he even varied his usual editorial tendencies by staging an astonishing extended take that runs nearly three minutes and covers two floors of the hospital (with a classic Texas switch occurring in the background behind the doors of a fake elevator).
To make all of that work, Woo being woo, the guns all have infinite ammo, with everyone stopping to reload only when it makes dramatic sense for them to do so. As a result, Hard Boiled is the apotheosis not just of Woo’s Hong Kong films, but of the entire “gun fu” subgenre as well. “In this world, whoever’s got the gun wins,” Johnny Wong notes at one point, but that’s not entirely true. It’s not the guns, it’s how you use them, and that applies to Woo as a filmmaker as much as it does to Tequila as a character. Any director can fill a crime film with non-stop gunplay, but it’s usually in the service of tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It takes an artist like John Woo to turn gun violence into visual poetry, and no one else has ever done that better, either in Hong Kong or abroad. Woo’s career has had its ups and downs over the decades, but Hard Boiled still stands as the film that defines the essence of what a John Woo film really is. Swan song or not, it’s his indelible gift to the world of cinema.
Cinematographer Wing-Hang Wong shot Hard Boiled on 35mm film using Arriflex cameras with spherical lenses, framed at 1.85:1 for its theatrical release. This version utilizes a 4K scan of the original camera negative, with digital restoration and grading performed by Duplitech (both Dolby Vision and HDR10 are included). Hard Boiled is filled with optical work like freeze frames, superimpositions, dissolves, fades, and step-printed slow motion, all of which affect the entire leading and trailing shots, so there’s a fair quantity of dupe footage cut into the negative. Those shots are unavoidably softer, but the camera negative footage looks sharp and well-resolved (at least when Wong wasn’t utilizing smoke and other diffusion, that is). All of that doesn’t necessarily require grading this 4K presentation of Hard Boiled on a curve, but it does mean that expectations need to be adjusted accordingly. The good news is that there’s no significant damage, and the robust encoding handles all of the varying levels of grain quite well. The HDR grade is relatively tame, but the colors and contrast all look exactly like they should, not flat and washed-out like on most previous releases. Is Hard Boiled dazzling in 4K? No. Is it still a huge upgrade over the previous Blu-ray versions? Oh, yes indeed it is.
One minor side note: despite the fact that the opening title sequence was all dupe footage anyway, this 4K version still used a clean version of the sequence sans titles, so they were all recreated digitally. Supposedly, there are some errors with the Chinese characters in the new titles, but anyone who doesn’t speak Chinese would never notice the difference (I certainly didn’t). It’s still something to be aware of.
Audio is offered in 2.0 mono Cantonese and English DTS-HD Master Audio, with removable English subtitles. It’s a pretty typical Hong Kong mix from that era, with somewhat compressed dynamics and post-synced dialogue that doesn’t integrate well into the soundstage. But there’s not much in the way of distortion, noise, or other artifacts, and the driving jazz/fusion score by Michael Gibss is still as much the heart and soul of Hard Boiled is are the non-stop gunfire and explosions.
The Shout! Studios 4K Ultra HD release of Hard Boiled is #17 in their Hong Kong Cinema Classics line. It’s a three-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film and an additional Blu-ray with the bulk of the extras. It also includes a 52-page booklet with essays by Russell Dyball, Callum Waddell, Grady Hendrix, and Victor Fan. Everything comes housed in a ridged slipcase featuring new artwork by Cheol joo Lee (the insert on the Amaray case uses the original “baby” artwork instead). The following extras are included:
DISC ONE: UHD
- Commentary by John Woo and Drew Taylor
- Commentary by Frank Djeng
- Commentary by John Woo, Terence Chang, Roger Avary, and David Kehr
DISC TWO: BD
- Commentary by John Woo and Drew Taylor
- Commentary by Frank Djeng
- Commentary by John Woo, Terence Chang, Roger Avary, and David Kehr
Shout! has added two new commentaries for this release. The first pairs Woo with The Wrap journalist Drew Taylor, who acts as a moderator for the track. Woo discusses the real-life crimes and police officers that inspired the film; developing the story and changing it at the last minute when had second thoughts about his original concept; collaborating with Chow Yun-Fat (Woo’s cameo was the actor’s idea); shooting the complex action scenes; why he decided to soften the ending; and much more. The nearly 80-year-old Woo is a little difficult to follow sometimes, but his memories are sound, so it’s an interesting track.
The second new commentary features programmer and former Tai Seng Entertainment marketing manager Frank Djeng, who dives into the proceedings with his usual loquacious enthusiasm. He considers Hard Boiled to be one of the most important Hong Kong action movies ever made, so he’s really in his element here. As usual, he identifies all of the cast and crew down to the smallest roles, including which actors were dubbed (unfortunately, Woo was one of them). He also identifies many of the locations and other practical details about the making of the film, but he offers some thoughts about the film on a thematic, dramatic, and stylistic level as well.
Shout! has also included the archival commentary track from the 1995 Criterion Collection LaserDisc (which was ported over to their 1998 DVD). That’s a pretty big deal, because it hasn’t been offered anywhere else, at least until now. It’s one of Criterion’s patented curated tracks, with John Woo, producer Terence Chang, filmmaker Roger Avary, and critic David Kehr all recorded separately and edited together. This was just three years after Woo and Chang made Hard Boiled, so their memories were even fresher, while Avary and Kehr are on hand to provide an appreciation for what they accomplished.
DISC THREE: BD
- Violent Night (HD – 41:06)
- Boiling Over (HD – 22:06)
- No Time for Failure (HD – 11:59)
- Hard to Resist (HD – 10:20)
- Boiled to Perfection (HD – 16:42)
- Body Count Blues (HD – 10:00)
- Hong Kong Confidential (HD – 13:03)
- Gun-Fu Fever (HD – 18:38)
- Chewing the Fat (HD – 12:43)
- Deleted and Extended Scenes (HD & Upscaled SD – 13:58)
- Trailers (HD – 6:28, 2 in all)
- Image Gallery (HD – 3:41)
Most of the extras on the third disc consist of new interviews conducted by High Rising Productions and Ballyhoo Motion Pictures. The first six include members of the cast and crew. Violent Night is with the man himself, the legendary John Woo. He discusses his inspirations for the story and then breaks down the making of the film in some detail. He also explains why he made the leap to Hollywood after Hard Boiled was released. Boiling Over is with actor Anthony Wong, who doesn’t appear to be a fan of Woo’s over-the-top style in general and Hard Boiled in particular (although he admits that he hasn’t rewatched the film since they made it). No Time for Failure is with Terence Chang, who explains why he and Woo decided to make a film that glorified law enforcement rather than the criminals, and how the story evolved during shooting. Hard to Resist and Boiled to Perfection are with screenwriters Gordon Chan and Chan Hing-Ka, respectively. They also cover the evolution of the story, including the way that the lead characters were redefined as they polished the script. Finally, Body Count Blues is with composer Michael Gibbs, who describes the challenges of developing the music without being given clear direction about what Chang and Woo wanted from him.
The last three interviews are with various authors and academics. Hong Kong Confidential is the latest in a continuing series with Grady Hendrix, co-author of These Fists Break Bricks, who calls Hard Boiled “the Wooiest Woo movie that John Woo ever Wooed”—and it’s hard to argue with that. Hendrix focuses on the improvisatory nature of Woo’s filmmaking, demonstrating just how much that Hard Boiled was made up on the fly. Gun-Fu Fever is with Dr. Leon Hunt, lecturer and co-editor of East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film. As the title suggests, he explores how gun-fu films like Hard Boiled, A Better Tomorrow, and City on Fire developed out of the traditional wuxia genre. He also cross-references Peckinpah films like The Wild Bunch. In Chewing the Fat, author and lecturer Dr. Lin Feng takes a different tack, exploring how Hard Boiled fits into Chow Yun-Fat’s filmography rather than Woo’s—and considering that she wrote Chow Yun-Fat and the Territories of Hong Kong Stardom, she’s working comfortably in her zone.
Finally, in addition to the Theatrical Trailer and an Image Gallery, there’s a collection of Deleted and Extended Scenes. It includes footage from the Taiwanese cut of Hard Boiled, most of which consists of scene extensions and sometimes even alternate takes. It’s not all-inclusive of every single difference between the two versions, but it does comprise the most noteworthy changes. (The footage has been cut into the existing scenes from the new 4K master, so it’s easy to tell which shots are the added ones.) There’s also footage from the censored South Korean cut, which has two additional scenes of Tequila playing clarinet, but the big difference is that it includes the original downbeat ending of the film before Woo decided to soften it for the Hong Kong version. (It’s even easier to spot the footage this time since it’s been upscaled from a South Korean VHS copy of the film.)
While it’s great that the old Criterion commentary has been included here, there are a few other previous extras that haven’t been. Criterion’s LaserDisc also offered various essays and some behind-the-scenes footage from the set of Hard Target, while their subsequent DVD added Woo’s student film Accidentally and trailers for 10 of his other Hong Kong films. The DVD from Fox Lorber offered a different commentary with Woo and Terence Chang. The DVD from Tartan Video in the U.K. had an interview with Woo and a comparison of cut & uncut scenes from the film. The Dragon Dynasty DVD and Blu-ray releases offered a commentary with Bey Logan and different interviews with Woo, Chang, actor Phillip Chan, and actor/choreographer Kwok Choi, as well as a location guide. The French DVD from HK Video offered a documentary called The Test of Time. All that, plus Hard Boiled itself was included as an extra on Midway’s 2007 Collector’s Edition release of their Woo-inspired video game Stranglehold.
As always, you’ll probably want to hang onto any of those discs if you happen to have them, but in all other respects, this Shout! Studios release has the clear edge in terms of extras. It’s got an even bigger edge in terms of video quality, so this is pretty much a mandatory upgrade for any John Woo fan—or Chow Yun-Fat fan, or Hong Kong new wave fan, or gun-fu fan, or... well, just pick it up, m’kay? You won’t regret it.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).