Do Yourself a Favor And Add John Woo’s Hard Boiled to Your Nostalgia Watch List

We indulge in a fair amount of nostalgia in the Black Nerd Problems office. We pride ourselves on our love of 90s cartoons like Gargoyles and Darkwing Duck and our dedication to old video games (see the entire Staff Beef on Tekken vs. Soul Calibur vs. Street Fighter, it’ll take you back. I mostly keep my mouth shut so as not to show my age, not to mention the fact that making a lame suggestion will get you left out of the Wednesday Night Spades game. It does get me thinking about what was blowing my mind back in the 90s. I was in college and had a best friend who was an avid movie fan. He was obsessed with Asian cinema. We watched every Bruce Lee movie for context then moved on to fall in love with Jackie Chan in The Legend of the Drunken Master and be amazed by Jet Li in The Legend of Fong Sai Yuk. Then, around 1995, we discovered dubbed VHS tapes of the Hong Kong action movies of John Woo, hereafter known as The God of Action Movies, and no action movie was ever the same again. This weekend, I snuggled up with my nostalgia (and a Blu-Ray player) and rewatched the last of his original Hong Kong bad cop movies, Hard Boiled, starring Yun-Fat Chow and Tony Chiu Wai Leung. It did not disappoint. In the movie Yun-Fat Chow plays Tequila, a cop who in the opening sequence is trying to break up an illegal gun smuggling deal. Now when I say “opening sequence” what really happens is enough mayhem in the first 5 minutes to fill half the action movies I’d seen up to that point. It all h…