"Actor: Mo Shun Kwan"

• Hard Boiled | DVD | (10/05/1993) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  Inspector Yuen nicknamed 'Tequila' is a courageous cop who shoots from both hips never reloads and never misses. A tough guy with a soft spot and infinite charm Tequila is the only man for the job of cleaning up the city and when his partner is killed in a spectacular shoot-out he decides to take the investigation into his own lethal hands. With a body count well into three figures more firepower than you can shake an Uzi at stylised adrenalin-pumping action sequences which make Hollywood blockbusters look like Bambi this is still John Woo's most outrageous flick!

• Hard Boiled | DVD | (28/01/2013) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Masterful Hong Kong action director John Woo (The Killer Face/Off) turns in this exciting and pyrotechnic tale of warring gangsters and shifting loyalties. Chow Yun-Fat (The Replacement Killers) plays a take-no-prisoners cop on the trail of the Triad the Hong Kong Mafia when his partner is killed during a gun battle. His guilt propels him into an all-out war against the gang including an up-and-coming soldier in the mob (Tony Leung) who turns out to be an undercover cop. The two men must come to terms with their allegiance to the force and their loyalty to each other as they try to take down the gangsters. A stunning feast of hyperbolic action sequences (including a climactic sequence in an entire hospital taken hostage) Hard Boiled is a rare treat for fans of the action genre with sequences as thrilling and intense as any ever committed to film.

• Hard Boiled | DVD | (19/03/2001) from £7.91   |  Saving you £12.08 (152.72%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Released in 1992, Hard Boiled is John Woo's farewell to the kind of blood-spattered cinema of vengeance and redemption with which he had made his name as a director in Hong Kong during the late 1980s. The following year he was in Hollywood filming Hard Target with Jean-Claude Van Damme, and an era had effectively ended. This might explain the elegiac feel Woo brings to his study of two men haunted by the violent consequences of their actions. Chow Yun Fat generates tremendous sullen energy in his portrayal of Tequila, a plain-clothes cop who not only loses his partner in a shoot-out with a gang of underground gunrunners but also discovers that he's unwittingly killed a fellow officer working undercover. Playing opposite him is Tony Leung as the enigmatic Tony, a young police officer who has secretly managed to penetrate the world of illegal arms-dealing in the guise of a cold-blooded gangland assassin. With rival gangs fighting over the weapons trade and Tequila gunning for Tony, unaware of his true identity, Hard Boiled has an unsurprisingly high body count, particularly when the various factions converge on a private hospital, reducing it by the movie's end to a smoking war zone, its corridors strewn with corpses. John Woo's ability to exploit the comic-book profundities of the genre, endowing his set-piece action sequences with a uniquely emotional edge, comes through in the controlled use of slow motion, cut-away details and brooding freeze-frame studies of the central characters. The image of Chow Yun Fat cradling an abandoned baby against his chest while he blasts his way out of the hospital's maternity unit has an enduring sharpness to it. However, a sense of ending runs throughout the movie, as if Woo were acknowledging that, having done everything he could with the format, the time had come for him to move on. And perhaps it had. --Ken Hollings