Hard Boiled, notable as John Woo’s final movie prior to his Hollywood-blockbuster directorial career, serves as an action-packed showcase of his signature style combining acrobatic fisticuffs with frequent spurts of slow motion. Also about 230 people are shot dead, if you’re into that sort of thing. The elaborately choreographed gun battles thrill, even though my DVD appeared to be a bootleg with dubbing from one Chinese dialect to another and poorly translated English subtitles. It’s certainly representative of the cop-movie drama, packed with the following cliché plot elements:

1. Our hero (Chow Yun-Fat) has a score to settle.
2. Because a crime syndicate killed his optimistic young partner, who talks lovingly about his children then gets killed in the first 15 minutes of the film, setting up the Revenge Factor.
3. The cocky young replacement partner (Tony Leung) crimps the style of our hero. But they see through their differences and join forces.
4. Bonus: The cocky young partner lives on a houseboat.
5. The crime syndicate features a Boss and a Henchman of the Boss, with renegade flair and long hair to differentiate him from the Boss.
6. A plucky female colleague proves her mettle late in the film: she picks up a gun with a limp-fish grip and shoots dead a bad guy who doesn’t believe she’s capable.
7. All of the handguns fire far more bullets before reloading than one would think possible.
8. And my favorite: imperiled children to magnify our hero’s humanity. In this case they’re quite young: merely newborns in a hospital nursery. The bad guys have hidden a weapons cache in the basement of the hospital, then decide to blow up the whole building. The drawn-out conclusion features SWAT guys getting picked off as they pass the babies out a hospital window down to safety. Our hero rescues the last one personally, leaping through the flames and rubble in slow motion.