Directed by John Woo. Written by Chuck Pfarrer
Anyone familiar with John Woo and Jean-Claude Van Damme already knows what to expect with Hard Target, so all I can do is confirm it: yes, there are high kicks, there are explosions. They often go off in slow-motion, both the kicks and the explosions. It’s predictable, it is silly, and it’s fun all the way through.
Yancy Butler plays Natascha, a woman worried about her homeless father who’s stopped responding to her letters. She travels to New Orleans, where she runs into Chance Boudreaux, a former soldier who’s struggling to make a living. As he’s familiar with those on the margins, she hires him to figure out what happened to her father, and the clues lead to a group of men who, for a price, help rich people hunt destitute people for sport.
Hard Target is delightful because it’s such a purebred dumb action movie that does everything well. Its story is an unpretentious metaphor for class warfare, and it prides itself on its corny lines and its bad performances. It has a leading man with a glorious mullet and throbbing muscles, huge explosions, gunfights, and bad guys who are campy in their evil.
Best of all, it has a director who is both efficient and indulgent in the right places. Anytime words are spoken it’s purely to move the plot along and get to what the movie does best: carnage delivered in creative and impressive ways.
Its appreciation of the action genre’s finer things is most obvious when director Woo puts things into slow-mo for maximum effect. Real explosions are cool, and slowing them down helps you watch them unfold, and that’s even more cool. Sometimes it’s that simple.
As Chance Boudreaux, Jean-Claude Van Damme doesn’t manage to deliver a single believable line, but his acrobatic kicks are still a wonder, and his mullet cuts through the air wonderfully as he spins. Watching Hard Target, with its explosions and its gratuitous action, you also realize what we’ve lost to some extent.
By that I mean the fear. You can see it in Van Damme’s face as he does his stunts, his teeth bared and eyes so wide they look like they’re fighting to detach from the middle of his face. Who can blame him? He’s standing atop a motorcycle going down the highway shooting indiscriminately at some off-screen foe as a genuine fireball goes up behind him. In a far-fetched movie such as this, a reaction like Van Damme’s is pretty much the most relatable thing.
With dangerous stunts such as these increasingly subcontracted to CGI, seeing genuine reactions on the faces of action stars feel like a novelty, especially the way Van Damme does it. The John Wick-franchise is the closest thing we have to these deranged and campy old action movies, and even here Keanu Reeves just grits his teeth as it rains bullets and bodies.
Not Van Damme. Once credits roll on Hard Target, you will have smelt the adrenaline and terror sweat coming off of him, but you’ll also have seen why John Woo is a singular and influential action director, and enjoyed how the two combine for something close to an archetypal late 80s/early 90s action flick.
Mikkel Frederiksen 