Hard Boiled (film)/Awesome

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • In the opening gunfight in John Woo's Hard Boiled, Officer "Tequila" (played by Chow Yun-Fat) takes out two bad guys with his guns while sliding down a banister in what may be the iconic Guns Akimbo moment.
    • The entire hospital sequence later in the film has its own Crowning Moments of Awesome as well, including Tequila's unique way of opening the door to Johnny's arsenal, involving gunpowder poured into a pipe and a dead-eye shot on a primer, Tequila and Alan going room to room and blasting up bad guys, Teresa and the Special Duties Unit officers getting the babies of the maternity ward to safety with the bad guys trying to stop them every step of the way, and Tequila saving the last baby in seriously awesome style as Johnny blows the place to hell.
    • Not to mention Mad Dog. As Johnny's Dragon, Mad Dog proves himself a serious badass early on, able to hold his own against both Tequila and Alan, all with only one eye. At one point, he fights the heroes with a single-shot Thompson/Center Contender pistol. But his true Crowning Moment of Awesome is the samurai-style staredown between him and Alan with a number of patients between them, followed by his Heel Face Turn when he orders the patients to get out, and then when Johnny busts in and starts killing the patients, blasts the Mini-Uzi right out of Johnny's hands and calls him on his rather psycho move, even though it ultimately gets him killed.
  • Every single cop in the film gets at least one of these.
    • That bit when Johnny Wong's thugs start locking down the hospital, and find Teresa trying to save the babies in the maternity ward. One of the thugs aims right at her head and starts yelling at her to join the rest of the hostages. What does Teresa do? She SLAPS the guy right in the face and tells him to shut up because he's scaring the babies.
      • Which is made all the better once the fighting between the thugs and SDU gets underway. Teresa is helping the SDU evacuate the maternity ward, when a couple of gangsters break into the ward and blow the cops away. There's one thug -- the same guy that Teresa slapped earlier -- and Teresa is the only one left standing. She grabs a gun to defend herself. The thug slaps her in the face to get her to drop the gun. She blows him away without blinking an eye. Don't ever mess with her when babies are involved.
    • Even Captain Pang, the Obstructive Bureaucrat gets a Crowning Moment of Awesome when he takes a level in Badass during the evacuation of the hospital. After putting up with crap from the Obstructive Bureaucrat Hospital Administrator about evacuating, Teresa simply turns on the fire alarm, obligating them to evacuate. Even then, the Hospital Administrator still tries to stop them. Pang grabs the guy by the shoulders, looks him right in the eye and growls, "If you obstruct me again, I'll castrate you!"
  • Spitting out a toothpick, shooting a guy and blood splattering back in your face all in about a nanosecond.