Any action extravaganza that builds its marketing campaign around the tagline “infinitely more exciting than a dozen Die Hards” is setting itself up for a spectacular fail, unless of course it actually manages to turn out superior to a film that’s widely lauded and highly regarded as the genre’s best ever. In a most welcome turn of events, then, Hard Boiled is very much that movie.
Bruce Willis’ maiden outing as John McClane is almost certainly the finest shoot ’em up that Hollywood has ever put out, but John Woo and Chow Yun-fat’s reunion in the 1992 classic is better. Is that a biased opinion? Absolutely. Is it unequivocally wrong and completely without merit? Not a chance, because Hard Boiled delivers everything you’d want and more from a kinetic, aesthetic, pyrotechnic, and explosive perspective and then some.
Three decades later, and a solitary Redditor has come forth with a sentiment that sums up its everlasting appeal in microcosm; the person in question had never seen Hard Boiled before, but upon laying eyes upon its unending glory, they were left with no other choice but to deem it as “the greatest action movie of all-time,” because that’s precisely what it is. It wasn’t even an isolated incident, either, with the comments section quickly loading up with nothing but praise for a true cinematic delight.
Even if you don’t agree that it rules the roost, nobody in their right mind can deny the majestic highs of a trigger-happy epic that somehow manages to incorporate several of the finest onscreen shootouts ever executed, a dizzying one-take shot that’s still among the technique’s granddaddies, nothing but practical effects, smooth jazz, a hero getting peed on by a baby to solve the problem of him being on fire before immediately jumping out of the window of a burning building, and a runtime that would probably be 30 minutes shorter if it wasn’t for all the slow motion scenes of people jumping, flying, or being blown through the air.