Hard Target by John Woo (1993)
Forget about Jean-Claude Van Damme and his glorious mullet. All you need to know about action icon John Woo’s first Hollywood film is that it stars Wilford Brimley as a Cajun moonshiner, bad French accent and all. I kid, of course… Hard Target is filled to the brim with the sort of over-the-top pyrotechnics, gunplay, and squib work that you’d expect from a John Woo film, as well as plenty of camera work that is distinctly Woo. And yes, there are doves. Maybe it’s the New Orleans setting, the terrible one-liners, or Arnold Vosloo and Lance Henriksen’s non-stop scene-chewing, but Hard Target proved less enjoyable than I was expecting from a riff on The Most Dangerous Game. It feels more like someone trying really hard to make a John Woo-style film, than an actual John Woo film. That said, there’s no knocking the movie’s peak ’90s stunt work, be it Woo’s riff on his own classic Hard Boiled, Van Damme’s ridiculous motorcycle assault, or main baddie Henriksen actually getting set on fire.
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