{"id":7921,"date":"2026-09-16T21:51:57","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T19:51:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/?p=7921"},"modified":"2026-09-16T22:07:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T20:07:18","slug":"%e8%be%a3%e6%89%8b%e7%a5%9e%e6%8e%a2-roughly-hot-handed-super-detective-aka-hard-boiled-by-john-woo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/2026\/09\/16\/%e8%be%a3%e6%89%8b%e7%a5%9e%e6%8e%a2-roughly-hot-handed-super-detective-aka-hard-boiled-by-john-woo\/","title":{"rendered":"\u8fa3\u624b\u795e\u63a2 (roughly: Hot-Handed Super Detective) aka Hard Boiled<\/em> by John Woo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blu-ray 4K treatments alone, like for Face\/Off<\/em> in 2023, don\u2019t count; remastered theatrical rereleases are what I\u2019m 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.)<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, while my treasured but ancient Made in Hong Kong widescreen VHS tapes haven\u2019t exactly become crisper over the years, they\u2019ve kept looking better than the DVD transfers available in the U.S. or Europe, which were roundly atrocious.<\/p>\n

Now, finally, \u8fa3\u624b\u795e\u63a2 (roughly: Hot-Handed Super Detective) aka Hard Boiled<\/em> and\u2014coming November\u2014\u558b\u8840\u96d9\u96c4 (roughly: Hero Blood Brothers) aka The Killer<\/em> have been both remastered and rereleased for the theater. My other HK VHS John Woo videos from that era\u2014\u82f1\u96c4\u672c\u8272 (True Hero\u2019s Colors) aka A Better Tomorrow<\/em>; \u558b\u8840\u8857\u982d (Blood Baths on the Streets) aka Bullet in the Head<\/em>; and \u7e31\u6a6b\u56db\u6d77 (Crossing the Four Seas Lengthwise and Crosswise) aka Once a Thief<\/em>\u2014have been holding up better because I didn\u2019t watch them that<\/em> 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<\/a> expressions? There might be a pattern here\u2026)<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing much to add to all that\u2019s been written about Hard Boiled<\/em>. All I can say is it\u2019s gorgeous and stylish and hyperkinetic on the big screen; it\u2019s Woo\u2019s last Hong Kong movie before he went to Hollywood in 1993 (where he stayed until 2008); it\u2019s his first movie where the hero\u2019s 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 \u82f1\u96c4\u672c\u8272\/A Better Tomorrow<\/em> (but Ringo Lam, of course, was also hugely<\/em> important for its early development.) Somewhere I\u2019ve read, I can\u2019t remember when or by whom, that among the movies Woo was inspired by were the movies of Sam Peckinpah, of which The Killer Elite<\/em> and The Wild Bunch<\/em> instantly come to mind in this context.<\/p>\n

There was a kind of sequel to \u8fa3\u624b\u795e\u63a2\/Hard Boiled<\/em>, namely the video game Stranglehold<\/em> from 2007, coproduced by Woo and with Chow\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n

Oh, by the way, Germany. Back when I still bought DVDs, I never bought any in Germany, because something<\/em> 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\u2019t care because I know the movie by heart, but my friends and everybody else in the theater were appropriately annoyed. There you go!<\/p>\n

Anyway, all this brings back a lot of memories, especially about Hong Kong. For which, sadly, there hasn\u2019t been a better tomorrow after all.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

\u8fa3\u624b\u795e\u63a2 (Hot-Handed Super Detective) aka Hard Boiled<\/em><\/a> by John Woo, 1992.
\nWatched at the Bambi theater on September 15, 2026, in its original language with garbled subtitles.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\ud83c\udfac Bloodshed in style.<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-archive","h-entry","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7921"}],"version-history":[{"count":87,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8009,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7921\/revisions\/8009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/betweendrafts.com\/justdrafts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}