Hard Target (1993) Dir: John Woo

John Woo is one of the best action directors who ever lived…fact.

His more recent work has overshadowed this simple truth but anyone who has seen the Hong Kong output of the late eighties and early nineties can testify to this. It was perhaps inevitable that Woo would eventually make his way to Hollywood where also inevitably his genius would be diluted and watered down until we got a film like Paycheck.

Now this is going to be controversial to some but I stand by this viewpoint.

John Woo’s best American film isn’t Face/Off or Windtalkers, it’s the first film he made over there, its Hard Target from 1993.

Sam Raimi was the producer responsible for shepherding Woo’s talent stateside and despite limited English and Raimi being on stand by to take over in case things didn’t work out, Woo made Jean Claude Van Damme’s best film and got the best performance out of him prior to JCVD. Despite being heavily censored to get an R Rating in the states, Hard Target feels like the only film Woo made in the studio system which was fully off the leash and crazy with its action scenes.

Face/Off was strangely muted, Broken Arrow was a poor imitation of Speed, Mission Impossible 2 was too in love with producer and star Tom Cruise and Windtalkers didn’t come close to fulfilling its potential. In Hard Target, Van Damme takes a two handguns blazing /split kicking approach to taking out the bad guys, grenades explode and pigeons fly in slo mo. People die violently and in ways that make you fist the air with joy,the lasting effect is a blood pumping adrenaline rush that I revisit time and again.

The story is basically a remake of 1930’s film The Most Dangerous Game, updated to an urban setting in this case New Orleans. Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) baits desperate homeless men (often ex military) with a promise of $10,000 if they can make it from one end of town to the next. Rich men then pay Fouchon for the privilege to hunt these poor men and bring them down like animals. What they don’t count on is that their latest kill, Douglas Binder has a daughter named Natasha (Yancy Butler) and she has come to town looking for him and asking all the questions they don’t want answered. Natasha ends up being saved from some thugs by Chance Boudreaux (Jean Claude Van Damme) a merchant sailor who was raised in the bayou by his uncle and has military training in his past. When her efforts with the police prove fruitless, Natasha hires Boudreaux to help her track down her father. This leads them to the attention of Fouchon and his right hand man Pik (Arnold Vosloo) and they decide that Boudreaux is the ultimate game and will be their last hunt.

A lot of the complaints about John Woo’s US output stem from the fact the films don’t have the heart that his Hong Kong films do. Whilst this is valid in some respects I think the heart on display in the heroic bloodshed subgenre he made his own just would not translate to the west. In The Killer when Chow Yun Fat and Danny Lee come face to face, guns drawn for the first time, the soundtrack goes all rom com for a moment and they look at each other with a very wry smile. If this happened when we first meet Christian Slater and John Travolta in Broken Arrow then there would have been mass walk outs. I think its something that was unique to Hong Kong cinema at the time, even much of Jackie Chan’s output around the same period revolved around the value of friendship (albeit slightly less homoerotic) and even today I don’t think western audiences are culturally savvy enough to take it that way without shouting GAY and stomping off.

If you are talking about the action, then Hard Target is definitely on a par with most of his HK work, with the exception of Hard Boiled whose carnage is hard to top. There is some heart in Hard Target for those prepared to look. The film is very much about the plight of the homeless whilst the rich get richer and turn a blind eye. There is even something approaching emotion in Van Damme’s eyes every time one of the good guys buys it. The subject matter is even more relevant today than it was back in 1993 and the fact that post Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans thousands were left homeless and starving while the republican government did nothing, makes the plot feel a lot more poignant.

Jean Claude Van Damme is not an actor, he is a movie star in the way that Arnold Schwarzenegger is not an actor no matter how much he tries. They are both performers who have charisma and presence but lack thespian chops. During the height of his career Van Damme worked with very few actual auteur’s and instead most of his work was directed by journeyman hacks or untested foreign directors.

As John Woo was at that point; an already proven talent he got Van Damme’s best work out of him, using his accent as part of the character and making him look cool as hell. The character of Chance Boudreaux wouldn’t have been out of place in a western (check out the way he sweeps back his coat near the beginning revealing not a gun but his leg which he is about to do some serious kicking with) and there is a look on Van Damme’s face that says he knows he is on to a good thing and he will never look cooler.

The supporting cast all turn in solid performances especially Lance Henrikson as a truly evil man, killing all who get in his way and Arnold Vosloo playing a man who is like the evil opposite of Boudreaux without a moral compass.

Hard Target is a film that did respectable business when it came out in cinemas. It did better on video and was one of the last films during the ‘action hero’ phase of the late eighties and early nineties. It seems to have been forgotten mainly due to the fact that Van Damme became something of a joke due to his personal problems and the end of the above the title beefcake action hero era. For my money, Hard Target is great Saturday night entertainment and a Van Damme good time at the flicks.

by Chris Holt

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