Apparently I'm going soft, because Danny Onions circa 1993 was hyped-as-shit about Hard Target. I was a pretty big Van Damme fan and was also one of those westerners that eagerly sought out the films of John Woo, long before he became the buzzed-about saviour of the Hollywood action film (which of course didn't happen)--so Hard Target was basically manna from heaven. I waited with baited breath for this movie, and when I finally saw the trailer ( I believe it might have even been on the Jurassic Park VHS) I lost my shit.
It was this trailer:
When I eventually got to see it, many excruciating months later on video because of its R rating, I was not disappointed. It mixed the cheese of a regular Van Damme outing with Woo's slow-motion ballet of carnage and that was about all I was hoping for. Many years later, seeing Hard Target again, I would say it plays even better than it did then. Is it Van Damme's best movie? I think it is. Although, if a Van Damme doesn't do the splits in a Van Damme movie, is it still a Van Damme movie? That's a philosophical question that I'll leave for another time.
Hard Target is a man-hunting-man movie set in the seedy side of New Orleans, and eventually the bayou. Rich assholes are paying evil mercenaries Lance Henrikson and Arnold Vosloo for the pleasure of hunting men for sport. Henrikson and Vosloo carefully select ex-army vets with combat training as their targets, you know, to make it sporting. These are men who have fallen on hard times, they live on the streets, will do just about anything to put some cash in their pocket and nobody will miss them when they're gone. To make them semi-willing, Henrikson offers the men 10,000 cash in order to tempt them into gambling with their lives.
Their dirty little enterprise hits a snag when a woman, played by Yancy Butler, comes to town looking for her long-lost father, who turns out to be one of their recent kills. This woman hires a local transient to help her navigate the dangerous New Orleans streets in her search for answers. This down-on-his-luck local is named Chance Boudrex and is played obviously by Jean Claude Fucking Van Damme, with greasy hair extensions. When Yancy Butler asks him why his name is Chance, he garbles the amazing line, "My momma took one". Their search for answers naturally puts them in the crosshairs of Henrikson and Vosloo and the movie transitions to full on slow-motion action mayhem.
The first thing that struck me about Hard Target (re-struck?) is just how much meat is on the bones of its story. Let's face it, nobody would mistake it for a deep parable about class warfare, but there is surprisingly more going on than the usual brain-dead actioner. I just reviewed Gamer, a depressingly awful man-hunting-man movie, and Hard Target tops it in every conceivable way, including the action. But it actually takes it's time setting up the story and world, doling out the action sparingly in the first 45 minutes in favour of answering any niggling questions and filling in the sketchier details of its premise.
Compared to the absolute shit I've been watching lately, I was totally impressed with Hard Target's tight script and plotting. It even takes the time to delve into the humanity of those being hunted, something that Gamer doesn't bother to do, even with its main character. The idea of rich pricks hunting and killing homeless men is obviously monstrous, but the film actually makes the effort to rise above the exploitation plot by forcing us to look at the city through the eyes of the homeless population. When Butler's character finds flyer's for a strip club among her fathers things she is confused, but Boudreux and another homeless man quickly explain that he passed them out for money, then breaking eye contact, they admit that they too have had to do the same. These are proud men, war heroes who have been forgotten by the world and reduced to acts of survival. It's a surprisingly genuine moment. There is a certain level of respect for the audience at work here, despite the fact that the genre doesn't even necessarily call for it. Watching it in 2010, after story-less fluff like Gamer and Zombieland, it feels downright old school and solid.
The above-average story and plotting is surprising. The fact that the action kicks ass is not. While this doesn't rank among John Woo's best films, Hard Target still displays his visual invention and flare, and was still miles ahead of most Western action fare of the time. However, when watching Hard Target, its impossible not to think that Woo was somehow hamstrung by Hollywood's more conservative attitudes and styles, and therefore wasn't able to be quite as balletic and gonzo as he was in his HK films. I mean, Woo's other Hard movie, Hard Boiled featured his muse Chow Yun Fat killing the fuck out of dudes with a shotgun, while holding a infant to his chest. Then he jumps out of an exploding building clutching the baby. It's nuts. Western audiences pre-Matrix weren't very receptive to the gun-fu and wire-work of HK genre films and preferred a more heavy-footed, semi-realistic approach to onscreen violence. HK films had it right though. They took movie violence and translated it into exactly what it was: macho mythology. Handguns had a thousand bullets and combatants often took to the air to settle their disputes in visually poetic combat. Audiences embrace action movies and screen violence not because they are bloodthirsty sociopaths (for the most part), but because we have an affinity for stories of daring and danger. It's deep-seated and probably genetically hard-coded. HK films recognized this and simply juiced up the daring and danger until it took on symphonic and lyrical proportions.
Still, the action in Hard Target is pretty dazzling, and most importantly, crystal clear in its execution. I can't help but feel that if Woo had been able to successfully translate his style to Hollywood, we would be seeing far less of the shaky-cam and strobe editing that define the modern action movie. A Woo action scene upholds spacial clarity and allows the viewer to bask in the kinetic energy of a kick or a spray of hot lead. I still can't understand why the Paul Greengrass/Ridley Scott brand of action direction has such a vice-like grip over Hollywood. Audiences have payed to go see an action movie, why then do these directors go out of their way to make it almost impossible to see any of the action? Woo plays with films speeds, relying heavily on slow motion and freeze frames so that you can process every hit and marvel at every carefully executed stunt. He is a very giving director.
If it seems like I'm making Hard Target out to be some kind of masterpiece, I don't mean to. It's not a masterpiece. It just fucking delivers on its promise and I'm so accustomed to the decline of genre entertainment that that actually surprises me nowadays. Hard Target is more hilarious than genuinely thrilling. Between Van Damme's greasy mullet whipping through the air in slow-motion and Wilford Brimley's forced Cajun manimal musings, Hard Target just might be a masterpiece of another kind--a bad movie masterpiece. And the best part is there's no doubts as to what kind of movie the filmmakers were engaged in. It's not an unintentional bad movie, its an expertly crafted joke. Woo probably took one look at the mullet-ed Van Damme in his Canadian tuxedo and got his translator to announce "Let's have him surf a motorcycle straight into a truck, which he dives over and blows up with a handgun". When Van Damme punches a fucking snake in the face you know that Woo is in on the joke and not the butt of it.
The entire cast is equally up to the task of crafting a symphony of cheese. When Van Damme tells Wilford Brimley, his backwater Cajun Uncle, that men are coming to kill him, Brimley attempts his best Creole patois and says "I know, I can smell dem". That line destroyed me. Lance Henrikson is a gravel-voiced god among b-movie character actors and his evil Emil Fouchon ranks with some his best villain roles. How evil is Fouchon? He plays a mournful piano suite in a room draped with white linen as his henchmen lays out the ground rules of the hunt to a rich client. He's piano-suite evil! As the chase for Van Damme goes on, Fouchon becomes more and more irritated and begins beating and killing the very men that are paying him small fortunes for the pleasure of the hunt. Fouchon literally becomes inflamed with irritation as his coat catches fire from one of Van Damme's amazingly accurate shotgun blasts to a gas can. Arnold Vosloo, who is only possibly remembered as the villain from the first Mummy movie, is great as the South African violence-junkie mercenary in Fouchon's employ, and helps give the movie a nice one-two villain punch.
Yancy Butler, who was moderately famous for about 15 seconds in the early 90's, seems to be the only one taking things seriously in the movie, which is fine for her character. When looking at her attractive, feline face, I wondered why she didn't become more famous or have a better career. She looks quite a bit like Angelina Jolie.
Why couldn't Butler have had the kind of career Jolie had? What's the difference between Yancy Butler and Angelina Jolie really? About 5 pounds of eyebrow, 12 pounds of heartthrob common-law goatee, 12 children, and a DUI arrest, I guess.
Van Damme is the draw here of course, and like I said earlier, Hard Target is one of his best, if not his best movie. He smartly was able to convince Universal studios to bring on Woo as a director, and the result is a typically poor performance blown up to mythical proportions. Woo treats him as his Man With No Name, or rather his Man With Hilarious Name, and between his slow-motion camera caresses and Graham Revelle's Ry-Cooder-y slide guitar score that announce him, Van Damme kicks his way through the movie like a classic Hollywood badass. Van Damme's opening fight scene is even staged like a western dust-up in the town square. For once Van Damme's French-ness is actually suited to his role as a backwoods Cajun, and while his line-garbling accent is no better here than it ever was, the character of Chance Boudreux is less ill-fitting than most of his other roles. Still, I wish he had done the splits at least one in Hard Target, than it would've been the total package.
Hard Target kicks fucking ass. I don't have the lists in front of me, but it's either gotta rank somewhere as one of the best action movies of the 90's, or one of the funniest comedies.
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