Hard Boiled (1992, John Woo)

The first act of Hard Boiled is fantastic. Between Woo’s glossy, smooth jazz but with bite tone and Chow Yun-Fat’s glorious lead performance; it’s all like butter. There’s a big, intricate shootout with Woo (and his editors Ah-Chik, Kai Kit-Wai, and David Wu) doing masterful work, there’s some workplace humor with cop Chow being on the outs with some of the time girlfriend and all of the time supervisor Teresa Mo, there’s Chow at a jazz club, and there’s Tony Chiu-Wai Leung doing a cool soulful (but smooth jazz soulful) gangster. It’s awesome.

Unfortunately, Hard Boiled runs two hours and change (depending how much violence has been cut out) and while the first act lasts a quarter of it and the next thirty or so minutes is still solid—as Leung has to decide whether or not to betray nice guy (for a triad) boss Kwan Hoi-San for obnoxious but successful Anthony Chau-Sang Wong while Chow enters the orbit, out for Wong’s head—but the movie runs out of story in at about the hour mark. There’s some plotting for the rest of it, but it’s really just moving bodies to their next stunt point.

And the second hour of Hard Boiled, which takes place in one location, which gets shot and blown up to hell as Chow, Leung, and Wong (mostly through his main enforcer, a very effective Phillip Chung-Fung Kwok) wage war on each other. See, Wong’s an arms smuggler so there are all sorts of neat guns and explosives for the fellows to play with as the bad guys go from endangering civilians to holding babies hostage. You know Wong and his guys are bad because they’re willing to kill babies.

It’s a really cheap way to drum up concern for the collateral damage, but it’s fine. The star of the second half of Hard Boiled is the pyrotechnics. Things are always blowing up. Yes, the infinite ammo mode gunfights are elaborate as well, but Woo doesn’t really direct them so much as execute them. The bangs and booms are the stars of the movie, not Chow or Leung. They’re just the guys who led the camera to the best places for bangs and booms.

The movie doesn’t even take the time for big bad fights—there’s more of one in the opening gunfight than anywhere else, even though Kwok’s in the movie a lot more than Wong—because it rejects the idea any of it can be personal. Barry Wong’s script doesn’t do character development or character arcs. It just does setups to action set pieces for Woo to execute. Leung gets some pensive alone time, which is fine and sympathizing (eventually and sort of retroactively), while most of Chow’s is spent with… director Woo, who also plays the jazz club owner, who used to be a cop too.

Woo is not a good actor and the scenes—outside when they bring the main plot in—are pretty blah. Especially since Chow and Mo are a really fun bicker couple. Mo’s usually around in the film, but never with enough to do. Woo doesn’t have time for a badass female super cop, just the one dude. And Chow’s good for it. Though even he loses his energy by the third act, maybe as he’s waiting for the scene where they blow up a set while he walks through it. There are a lot of stunts in Hard Boiled and you can usually tell when it’s not Chow and when it is Leung. Leung seems to be in the fistfights more than Chow, but Chow then turns around and lets them blow up the floor of a building with him on it.

Great stunt work, great action choreography, but Woo’s directing to show off those elements, not make it part of a narrative gesture or anything. The first hour’s just an excuse for the second.

Leung’s great, Chow’s great. Wong’s low okay. Kwok’s good, Mo’s good. Philip Chan’s fine as the big cop boss. His part’s iffy.

And the rest of the cast, eventual bang and boom fodder, sometimes for set decoration sometimes to motivate Leung or Chow, they’re all solid. Wong doesn’t even take the time to make them caricatures they’re so disposable, especially after the first act.

Hard Boiled’s sometimes really good, always pretty good, and just a little long at times. It’s got a lot of expertly executed action and some good performances, it just doesn’t really have much of a movie. It turns out it is, after all, smooth jazz.

Enter the Fat Dragon (2020, Tanigaki Kenji)

Enter the Fat Dragon is about Hong Kong super-cop Donnie Yen (already in a pound of makeup before he puts on the fat suit, presumably to look more age appropriate for love interest Niki Chow) who goes too far one too many times and finds himself busted down to the evidence room. After Chow dumps him—they’ve been together ten years and just now about to get married and he ruins their engagement photo shoot with his opening action sequence (it’s a bigger deal because she’s an actress whose profession he doesn’t respect)–Yen hits the junk food hard, which is clearly a big change for him since he started the movie junk food shaming subordinate then boss Louis Cheung for eating a slice of pineapple. Pretty soon he’s put on a hundred pounds; Yen started the movie at a cool one-fifty, because it’s in the opening narration.

It’s weird for a fifty-seven year-old man to talk to you about his weight at the start of a movie but whatever.

He’s clearly only supposed to be thirty-five.

Anyway. Dragon is a movie from 2020 where star producer hyphenate Yen thought it was a great idea to put on a fat suit and do wire-fu on an absolutely fantastic Japanese street set. It took a while to realize it was a set, but once I did, I kept getting distracted with the great detail in the background cast. Whoever designed the set, built it, directed the extras, just phenomenal work.

Lee Kin-wai’s the art director, so maybe it’s Lee Kin-wai’s department.

There’s an okay fight scene on the street set, going on the rooftops and such. Tanigaki’s direction gets most of the martial arts action, but doesn’t do anything interesting with it. It doesn’t showcase Yen well, which might more be because he doesn’t get any close-ups in the movie because of all the make-up he’s clearly wearing.

And some of the other action is fine. It’s too rush—Dragon runs just over ninety minutes and hurries through subplots. But it’s obvious we’re not missing much.

After a while—and all the junk food in the vending machine—Yen goes to Japan on his redemption assignment, a prisoner transfer (throughout Dragon feels like a mix of an eighties action movies, James Bond, and whatever else I’ve forgotten—just never Enter the Dragon, outside some forced references). The transfer goes wrong thanks to dirty Japanese cop Takenaka Naoto and Yen’s stuck in Japan—he also loses his luggage, leading him to ex-Hong Kong cop Wong Jing. Wong—who also cowrote—is a big lovable dope who loves the restaurant owner (Teresa Mo) across the street. Together they’re basically joint foster parents to lovable teen orphan Lin Qiunan. Every Chinese person Yen meets in Japan is great and every Japanese person he meets in Japan is a villain.

The main villain is Joey Iwanaga, who’s more enthusiastic than the role needs or the movie seems to care. He’s Yakuza and behind Yen’s prisoner transfer problems; he’s also Chow’s new boss.

It’s never good—though there are a handful of great laughs, most of them exceptionally cheap because Enter the Fat Dragon is slapstick. Some of the way they “get away” with Yen being clumsy in the fat suit is having him be clumsy before the fat suit, when he’s just in that pound of make-up. Most of the slapstick’s not good.

The end is a large scale action finale; not good either. There may even be a Superman: The Movie nod.

Dragon’s bad slapstick with a lot of cheap jokes. Not the expected ones, but still cheap ones.

Yen’s not able to even make micro-expressions in his makeup so he hasn’t got much of a performance. The martial arts stuff looks good enough it’d be nice if the movie had a good director.

Chow’s eh. Even though they’re even more age inappropriate, Jessica Jann—as Takenaka’s Chinese national interpreter but not accomplice—and Yen have more chemistry than he ever has with Chow. It’s not her fault; she’s kind of a villain? She’s shallow because she doesn’t want him to be a super-cop, which somehow manages to become a subplot, though I guess you need it for the reconciliation arc.

The first act kept having… not exactly potential, but enthusiastic possibilities only it never takes them on. Instead—outside that great street set and some technical aspects of the finale–Dragon never really does anything. It’s milquetoast.