p e n g u i n d e v i l

This week I finally I got in a viewing of, ah yes, one of the great classic action films (and the last great John Woo/Chow Yun Fat film before they began trying to cross the seas to Hollywood)… Hard Boiled! Though things would soon be different (the next year Woo made “hard target” with johnclaudevandamme), this is classic Woo/Fat…Filled with trademark action including the famous “shooting while sliding” scene.

Of course, that scene is just a part of the tremendous carnival of gun carnage that starts this movie off with a bang, the famous teahouse massacre. There are no “doves in the chapel” scenes as in some of their other great works, but a lot of the standards are upheld: endless gunfights, slow motion jumping/falling/shooting/explosions, stacks of innocent victims and lots of shooting, lots and lots of shooting (to paraphrase Van Damme). We follow along as a jazz playing undercover agent named Tequila goes after Johnny Wong, a big arms dealer. He has the help of a double agent played by Tony Leung who plays three different sides here. They follow the standard plan utilizing lots of crazily choreographed combat scenes that fill over an hour of fantastically overboard gunfights to take the baddies down.

Woo also works to give us our fill of not only gunfire, but also lots of bodies flying through the air (and through windows), explosions and double-crossing all of which culminates with the half hour plus gunfight at the hospital that rounds things up, with many more explosions, more slaughter of innocents (including automatic weapons fire used against hospital patients) and much more shooting action a lot of which is in the always entertaining “double fisted shooting” style.

Hard Boiled is a true icon of gun violence and I dare you to try and keep track of the body count here.

Also we recently watched Fargo. The story of a foolish man whose scheme to extract money from his father-in-law by staging a kidnapping and collecting the ransom fails in the most terrible of fashions. William H Macy is brilliant in this, and Steve Buscemi does his standard great work as one of the kidnappers. It’s not one of my favorite Coen Brothers movies, but it is certainly a reliable bit of fun! It is fun to watch and intriguing and it is quite harsh in its violence, coming across as a very-black comedy. And then there is the second plot-line, which sees Francis McDormand as a small town police officer who is dragged into this when the kidnappers get pulled over on a rural road and end up gunning down three people. The characters there add a nice pleasent level of charm to the film (offsetting the rest of the cast, none of whom are charming at all) and is great fun with lots of the sidetracks (yes, and those accents) that really make this movie.