Hard-Boiled is actually Woo's most relaxed and confident film so far, and in many ways a terrific achievement. It offers nothing much new in plot terms... but its details and incidentals are gleefully idiosyncratic.

| Jul 27, 2023

Woo has elevated the action movie into the realm of art. Infinitely more exciting than a dozen Die Hards, action cinema doesn't come any better than this.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 27, 2023

Woo sets a pace for himself from the outset that he can't maintain. But his action sequences are so artfully handled and his sense of humor is so outrageous that it's difficult not to be tickled, and thrilled.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 27, 2023

Woo manages to imbue all this mass destruction with an air that is almost whimsical.

| Jul 27, 2023

Mr. Woo does, in fact, seem to be a very brisk, talented director with a gift for the flashy effect and the bizarre confrontation.

| Jul 27, 2023

It's astoundingly emotional and exhilarating, thanks to the oversized passions Woo grants his characters and the formal brilliance of his filming, with his rushing camera, extreme long takes and magnificent choreography of movement.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 27, 2023

This is ultra-violence so complex and stylized it plays like a ballet that's so dazzlingly choreographed it has you rubbing your eyes in disbelief.

| Jul 27, 2023

Woo's operatic tale of warring mobsters and the implacable cop caught between them can be enormous fun. But if you start to think what all this mega-violence is really about, Woo's brand of high-body-count cinema can be spiritually draining.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 27, 2023

The lush, powerful stylization is far from a mere exercise: It serves Woo's bittersweet mediation on identity and fractured loyalties.

| Jul 27, 2023

Movies like this need a big screen. They're a kick in the head.

| Jul 27, 2023

Soon, very soon, one realizes that all the film consists of is essentially the same demonstration of balletic bodycount, repeatedly graphic but deadeningly monotonous.

| Jul 27, 2023

Though the director insists his films have a moral, it is not easy to escape the suspicion that these films are made for the sort of pimply idiots who do not, in fact, give a damn how the shootouts are joined together.

| Jul 27, 2023

Action fans will enjoy the absurdity of a film that demonstrates that no matter how ridiculous Hollywood action movies get, they can always learn from other cultures how to be even more ridiculous.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 27, 2023

Hard-Boiled is action cinema at its finest and most imaginative.

| Jul 27, 2023

Woo is clearly a supreme man of action, but most of all, he is a man of heart.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 9, 2023

The violence in this ironic pairing often goes over the top, but Woo's delicious intelligence has its own stunning effect.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 11, 2023

Choreographically stunning like most of Woo's work, especially before he headed West.

| Mar 1, 2007

What's new here is a rich vein of anarchic humour and a bluesy back-beat of philosophical musings on a cop's sad lot. No surprise that Woo has been courted by Hollywood.

| Jun 24, 2006

All this would be overkill if it weren’t for the fact that Woo’s use of freeze frame and slow motion serves to make Hard Boiled even more of an art-house action movie than any of its predecessors.

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 12, 2005

A master stylist, Woo is similarly brilliant at examining the moral and social hierarchies of his patriarchal crime worlds.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 27, 2003