Hard Target and the Glorious Madness of John Woo
Hard Target. Distributed by Universal Pictures.
I am going to describe two actual scenes from the John Woo action film Hard Target, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, and you can judge for yourself how batshit insane this movie is.
In the first scene, Van Damme is in the Bayou with Yancy Butler, being pursued by a bunch of man-hunters through the bush. They have what passes for a tender, quiet moment and Van Damme tells her to close her eyes seductively. She does so, lips quivering ever so slightly. At this point Jean-Claude Van Damme grabs a poisonous snake from behind her head, chokes it out and then bites its tail off. End scene.
Before long, that will seem rather tame as we come upon Wilford Brimley making moonshine outside of his Bayou shack. Sure enough, it is only a matter of time before Wilford Brimley is hiding in the bushes and using his bow to shoot an arrow directly into a table full of moonshine and since this is a John Woo film, the moonshine bursts into an enormous ball of flame. End scene.
I hope you can glean from these short descriptions of a few scenes how absolutely bonkers this movie is. It was John Woo’s directorial debut in the United States (and indeed, I am told, the first time a Chinese director helmed a major Hollywood film). Like all John Woo films it is stylish to a fault, overwrought, fascinating to look at and full of terrible dialogue, hammy acting and incomprehensible plotting.
We are introduced to Van Damme’s character during a memorable vignette in a New Orleans diner, where the waitress asks “How’s the gumbo?” to which Van Damme replies in really the only way possible when you think about it: “It’s a tragedy.” Evidently, by the way, the film was set in New Orleans so that Van Damme’s accent could sort of be explained as Cajun. That is the kind of movie Hard Target is.
The funny thing is, as bad as the acting and the dialogue are, and stuffed in and around all these insane moments of complete nonsense, there is some really good stuff here. The camerawork is really clean and kinetic, with several excellent shots and blocking. The action is pretty great, especially when they just let Van Damme do roundhouses in exquisitely stylized slow motion. There is a scene where van damme (or a stunt double?) stands up on a motorcycle and crashes it into a car, rolling over the hood and then landing on his feet behind it.
Hard Target. Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.
They chop it up a bit with edits, but you can see it was done for real in a single take and it’s an absurdly cool stunt. Woo controls the film like a canvass – speeding up and slowing down time, switching to handheld pov, using freeze frames (most effectively in a scene that is more poignant than it has any right to be in this movie, where a black veteran is about to be gunned down after all the white people in the French Quarter ignore his pleas for help). It’s such a frenetic visual mish-mash that it could just end up as so much applesauce, but somehow it comes together with the air of a mad genius.
That’s how Woo’s films always are. Crazy moments of absolute visual genius stitched together with a bunch of head-scratching filler which almost becomes kind of fascinating in its own right for how weird and over the top it is. This style worked in Hong Kong, for the Hong Kong market especially. And it, remarkably, kind of works at certain points in Hard Target (likely, I think, because Van Dame can actually do a lot of his own stunts). But I cannot help but watch a visually fascinating film like this without wondering some times if this mad genius style he coined might be better deployed in service of a story, and characters and themes and dialogue that actually deserve it.
