Hard Boiled is a 1992 Hong Kong action film written and directed by John Woo, and starring Chow Yun-fat as Inspector "Tequila" Yuen, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai as Alan an undercover cop, and Anthony Wong as Johnny Wong, a leader of the criminal triads. The film features Tequila, whose partner (Bowie Lam) is killed in a tea house gunfight with a small army of gangsters. One of the mob's high ranking assassins is the undercover cop Alan, who must team up with Tequila for their common pursuit of taking down Wong's crime syndicate. The film leads up to a climax in a hospital, where the two must rescue innocent civilians and new born babies from the maternity ward while fighting off dozens of mob hitmen.

Hardboiled (or hard-boiled) fiction is a literary genre that shares some of its characters and settings with crime fiction (especially detective stories). Derived from the romantic tradition which emphasized the emotions of apprehension, awe, horror and terror, hardboiled fiction deviates from that tradition in the detective's cynical attitude towards those emotions. The attitude is conveyed through the detectives inner monologue describing to the reader (or, in film, to the viewer) what he is doing and feeling.