John Wick's directors came out of stunt work and have been explicit that the film is an answer to Hong Kong action cinema, and Hard Boiled is the peak of the style they were answering: gunplay choreographed and shot like dance, in long takes, with the camera moving with the performer rather than cutting around him. The specific inheritance is legibility. Woo holds the frame wide enough to see the whole body and the whole room, so the audience can follow who is where; John Wick does the same, against an American action convention of fast cutting and close framing that had made the geography unreadable. The gun-handling grammar, reloads included, comes from the same lineage.