Blu-ray 4K treatments alone, like for Face/Off in 2023, don’t count; remastered theatrical rereleases are what I’m interested in. I love the things I own that I collected in the past, like videos and then DVDs, but I stopped collecting things in favor of experiences many years ago. (Experiences sometimes come with a token, however, that I like to keep around as a kind of outsourced memory.)
What’s more, while my treasured but ancient Made in Hong Kong widescreen VHS tapes haven’t exactly become crisper over the years, they’ve kept looking better than the DVD transfers available in the U.S. or Europe, which were roundly atrocious.
Now, finally, 辣手神探 (roughly: Hot-Handed Super Detective) aka Hard Boiled and—coming November—喋血雙雄 (roughly: Hero Blood Brothers) aka The Killer have been both remastered and rereleased for the theater. My other HK VHS John Woo videos from that era—英雄本色 (True Hero’s Colors) aka A Better Tomorrow; 喋血街頭 (Blood Baths on the Streets) aka Bullet in the Head; and 縱橫四海 (Crossing the Four Seas Lengthwise and Crosswise) aka Once a Thief—have been holding up better because I didn’t watch them that often, but I hope to see them all in the theater in a not too distant future too. (Why are all these titles, by the way, suspiciously similar to chengyu expressions? There might be a pattern here…)
There’s nothing much to add to all that’s been written about Hard Boiled. All I can say is it’s gorgeous and stylish and hyperkinetic on the big screen; it’s Woo’s last Hong Kong movie before he went to Hollywood in 1993 (where he stayed until 2008); it’s his first movie where the hero’s not a gangster as far as I know (not counting his early martial arts movies); and the screenplay is completely bonkers in ways expected from and demanded by the heroic bloodshed genre. Which he had more or less single-handedly invented with 英雄本色/A Better Tomorrow (but Ringo Lam, of course, was also hugely important for its early development.) Somewhere I’ve read, I can’t remember when or by whom, that among the movies Woo was inspired by were the movies of Sam Peckinpah, of which The Killer Elite and The Wild Bunch instantly come to mind in this context.
There was a kind of sequel to 辣手神探/Hard Boiled, namely the video game Stranglehold from 2007, coproduced by Woo and with Chow’s participation. It was a blast! And when I was in Germany, all my friends came to visit me and play it on my rig because, no surprise, it was heavily censored in Germany. (The movie itself, I heard, had also been vigorously butchered.)
Oh, by the way, Germany. Back when I still bought DVDs, I never bought any in Germany, because something was always messed up from a shockingly large buffet of technical details you might not have guessed could be messed up in the first place. And, lo and behold, the lines of the German subtitles in the movie theater were inverted, so if there were several lines, you had to read them from bottom to top. I didn’t care because I know the movie by heart, but my friends and everybody else in the theater were appropriately annoyed. There you go!
Anyway, all this brings back a lot of memories, especially about Hong Kong. For which, sadly, there hasn’t been a better tomorrow after all.
辣手神探 (Hot-Handed Super Detective) aka Hard Boiled by John Woo, 1992.
Watched at the Bambi theater on September 15, 2026, in its original language with garbled subtitles.