Hard Boiled

On the commentary for this, the source they kept referring back to was a sort of Chinese opera, the Peking opera- it's a tradition I obviously know nothing about, but it's pretty easy to see the operatic origins for how Woo's style works, all enormous gestures and huge emotions expressed through actions that, except through the filter of the stylization, don't make a lot of sense. It's
strange, though, actually watching the movie, because you can't really place it for a while- it's got the sort of murky look of a lot of American movies from the seventies, and the pitch is somewhere between a kung fu movie and more Hollywood style action.

It's also sort of gut wrenching, for all that the gunfights are chaotic and spectacular (and difficult to follow) because it actually takes a fairly unwavering stance that human life is valuable, then allows the bad guys to mow down innocents by the dozen, and the heroes to accidentally kill other good guys in the crossfire. There is a lot of balletic but otherwise normal jumping around and machine gunning guys who you as an audience member are fine with being killed- bad guys- but there's also a sequence in which a hero guns down a dozen people from his own gang, without apparent cause, both protagonists shoot men point blank in the head when they are helpless, and helpless, crippled civilians are killed by the dozen in the hospital- not sadistically, not with any sense of them being tortured to psych the audience up for a big cathartic killing later, but just as part of the crossfire, because the bad guys don't really give a shit about them. The good guys do, but they're not torn up about it when they're killed.

I say the movie places value on human life, and I stand by that- although there are a lot of deaths that aren't reflected upon, and many of those that are are standard cop movie reflections, the totems of a dead fellow officer kind of things, there is never a sense of glee in a murder, never a feeling of delight in someone actually dying in an unusual way. The gunfights are performed as a dance of violence, but nobody is impaled, no quips are made, and there is never an argument put forth that anybody is 'scum' who deserves to die. Hard Boiled doesn't hold human life sacred, but it also doesn't yearn for anybody in particular to die: there is a standoff with the primary protagonist at the end in which he is killed, but the relief of his death is as much because he was an immediate threat as any idea of 'this guy has to die, I want to watch it'. It's still there, but it's not promoted particularly forcefully, and it's one person, not a class of humanity.

A lot of American action movies loop you in by threatening a child- the bad guys hold the hero's little girl hostage, and the hero has to get her back. Hard Boiled skirts the edge of this (certainly children, neonatal infants as it happens are threatened) but they aren't hostages- they're innocents caught in a bad situation- and there's no specific connection between them and the heroes. They're babies, and that's enough. It avoids entirely the uneasy sense of rape threat on which the American movies tend to turn, and overall is far less sexual in its violence.

It's possible that Hard Boiled is just as worrying as any other action movie, but it does avoid a lot of the specific things that worry me about American action movies, and especially the 80s action movies that immediately preface it. Given that Woo seems to have been folded entirely into the American system now, and had all the subtle elements of his directorial style sanded off, it's hard to see the underlying differences between his view of the world and the American one in his later work, but this one at least combines his talents- the beautiful set pieces, the broad and effective characters, the balletic movements- with a context that may or may not be his own, but which either way is refreshingly different from the relics that were his contemporaries.