As Brad Pitt’s new thriller Bullet Train arrives in cinemas, Guardian writers have picked their most exciting action films of all time
When John Woo’s 1989 breakthrough The Killer started slipping into repertory houses and cult video stores, it was the beginning of a revolution, like an adrenalized marriage between the cool of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï and the operatic bloodletting of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. But The Killer turned out to be a mere throat-clearing for Woo’s follow-up, Hard Boiled, which kicks off with a shootout in a teahouse filled with birdcages (bullets and feathers go flying) and builds to 40mins of pyrotechnics at a hospital that swings unforgettably through the nursery.
