Hard Target (1993)
After the Killer and Hard Boiled enjoyed some success in America, director John Woo found himself being approached by Hollywood to turn his attention from Hong Kong cinema, to American action movies. Unfortunately, his entry point into Hollywood filmmaking meant that he would have to work with Jean-Claude Van Damme as his star, and the creative stumbling block of the Motion Picture Association of America, who forced Woo to make several cuts to the finished product so he could secure an R rating. What we were left with in the end is a mildly entertaining, but hollow, and fairly lifeless movie.
Hard Target features Van Damme as a homeless man with exceptional martial arts skills, who is hired by Yancy Butler to help her uncover the facts behind her father’s murder, and hopefully bring the killers to justice. The film opens with the aforementioned murder and shows us a game of human hunting. All of this is arranged by Lance Henriksen and Arnold Vosloo who hire homeless men to play the hunted, while wealthy men pay for the privilege of being the hunter. If the hunted can escape they earn $10,000, if they don’t, they die.
The movie works very well on one level, it’s a stylish, and action-packed thriller. But, it is also vastly inferior to the average John Woo film, and his talents are wasted here. For a Van Damme flick, it’s one of his best, but there are not many other decent Van Damme vehicles to compare it to, and as such that’s not saying much.
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