Hard Boiled
Short description
Inspector Tequila Yuen is a Hong Kong police officer with a short fuse and little patience for negotiation. When his partner is killed during a shootout with arms traffickers, he sets out on his own to bring down the syndicate behind the smuggling and to settle the score. To reach the men at the top, he teams up with Alan, a mob hitman who is in fact an undercover officer, and the two men push their methods to brutal extremes as they work their way toward the gang's leadership.
John Woo directed the film, the ninth of the twenty-two features he has made in chronological order, following Once a Thief and preceding Hard Target. Barry Wong and Gordon Chan wrote the screenplay, and Terence Chang and Linda Kuk Mei-Lai produced. Chow Yun-fat plays Tequila, with Tony Leung Chiu-wai as Alan, Anthony Wong as the arms dealer Johnny Wong, Teresa Mo, Philip Chan and Stephen Tung Wai among a credited cast of twenty-five. Released in April 1992, the Hong Kong production cost about five million dollars and returned roughly three million at the worldwide box office.
Audiences rate the film at 7.7 out of 10 on IMDb from more than fifty-three thousand votes, and 7.5 out of 10 on TMDB from just under a thousand. A critics' rating of 7.8 out of 10, drawn from seventy-one reviews, places it slightly above both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Before this film, John Woo was criticized for idealizing criminals in his movies, so the director decided to make a film that would idealize the police.
- Using a shotgun in a rose box is an original idea found in both 'Terminator 2: Judgment Day' and 'Hard Boiled'. The fact that these two films were released at nearly the same time is a coincidence. A similar scene appears in two films that served as inspiration for 'Hard Boiled': 'Dog Day Afternoon', where Al Pacino's character brings a rifle into a bank, and 'The Killing', where a gang sneaks weapons for a heist into rose boxes.
- The use of a shotgun in a box of roses – is an original idea both in the film “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991) and in “Pulp Fiction”. The fact that these two films were released almost at the same time is merely a coincidence. A similar scene is present in two films that served as inspiration for the creation of “Pulp Fiction” – “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), where Al Pacino’s character brings a rifle into the bank; and “The Killing” (1956), where a gang smuggles weapons for a robbery in rose boxes.
- The script was almost completely rewritten a week before filming began. The first version of the script was about a man poisoning bottles of baby formula, but John Woo disliked the plot.
- The full version of the film lasts 131 minutes.
- The extended version has a runtime of 131 minutes.
- The film is dedicated to the memory of Barry Von, who died shortly before the premiere.
- Due to an extremely tight schedule, the film crew had only one attempt to shoot the three-minute hospital shootout scene in a single take.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
