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5. Hard Boiled - Teahouse Shootout

(Image reversed for reasons beyond comprehension.)

“We got some great birds.”

The blistering opening sequence to John Woo’s 1992 masterpiece represents the gold standard for Hong Kong gunplay. But it adheres to universal principles that heighten all action sequences.

The first principle is the slow build. The movie begins with jazz. Jazz! Our main characters are two members of a trio we see playing in a club as issues of Exposition Weekly fade into view lamenting rampant gun running that’s ruining Hong Kong. Our hero, Tequila (Chow Yun Fat - De Niro to Woo’s Scorsese), plays the clarinet. The clarinet! We are not expecting this guy to kick anyone’s ass.

We are then taken to a teahouse, a fairly innocuous setting made even more so by the Chinese tradition of bringing in birds (tying in nicely to Woo’s bird obsession). This tradition, incidentally, stopped a number of years ago. Three guesses as to why. But the dulcet tones of birds chirping lay the incongruous groundwork for what will soon be a cacophony of gunfire.

This particular teahouse, it should be noted, is the sole reason this sequence exists. Woo didn’t have a script when he shot this. He didn’t even have a story. And as that is often the problem with most action movies, here it doesn’t seem to matter.

Woo and his crew heard that this location, the historic Wun Loi Dai Cha Lau teahouse in Mong Kok, was about to be torn down. This meant two things. One, they had the opportunity to preserve it on film. Two, they could completely fuck it up without having to worry about putting it back together when they were done.

So, without a script or a story, they just walked in, looked around, and figured it out. As soon as Woo saw the stairway leading up to the teahouse, he envisioned Chow Yun Fat’s historic two-fisted slide down the banister. That’s right. One of the most iconic images in Hong Kong cinema history was made up on the fly.

Another fundamental action principle Woo exploits adeptly here is the power of the moving camera. In a word, Woo’s cinema is kinetic. He never uses a still shot when a moving one will do. And even the pace of the movement within the frame is up for grabs. He’ll cut to slo-mo without missing a beat, or even slow the action down within the same shot. For him, slow motion is not some gimmick. It’s as much a part of the language as the close-up.

It should come as no surprise that Woo was a talented dancer in his youth. To him, action choreography really is choreography. And he dances with his cinematographer as much as his stunt coordinator. As in the greatest movie musicals, the camera dances as skillfully as the dancers themselves. That the term “bullet ballet” was popularized in reference to Woo’s oeuvre is no coincidence.

While moving the camera is hardly new, Woo was one of the first to really bring it to this kind of action sequence. Spielberg’s fairly staid camera in the nonetheless stellar shootout in Raiders comes to mind. Another relatively fresh element Woo brings is the myth of the bulletproof bystander. In most movie shootouts, the crowd is immune when lead gets sprayed. Peckinpah helped to corrode this convention, but Woo just tears it to shreds. Instead of the cliché of the bad guy pushing people out of the way as he runs, he shoots them out of the way. A lot.

One cliché Woo does not improve upon is the partner signing his death warrant by talking about his family while the hero encourages him to get out of town. He might as well say he’s just bought a new boat called the Live-4-Ever.

And now for a bit of completely unsubstantiated film theory: Tequila’s pancaked face at the end represents the identity confusion inherent in the film (vis a vis Tony Leung), echoing the identity confusion inherent in Hong Kong at the time, as it was five years shy of being handed back to China from Britain. So Tequila is, for a moment, British on the surface but Chinese beneath.

Okay, I’ll stop that now.

See also: The rest of Hard Boiled, bar shootout in Desperado, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” sequence in Face/Off, all of The Killer.

Next: The highest-ranking sequence from a non-classic on this list.