Hard Target (1993)

Before we watched Hard Target, I told my friend Cary that it had “one of the most indelible images in cinema history,” which a) caused me to learn about their “the great films of cinema” Letterboxd list, and b) prompted them to keep guessing at what that image was until we arrived at it.

Most movies would kill for the images they guessed: the spin on the arrow that becomes the film’s title, any number of iconic shots of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s mullet, the guy getting hit in the nuts with his own motorcycle, Van Damme catching a leaping snake inches from Yancy Butler’s face and punching it, a cop putting a birthday cake with a fully-lit candle into a desk drawer and closing it, and so on, but it is unquestionably, unmistakably the hero shot of Wilford Brimley triumphantly riding riding a horse while a building explodes behind him. Hard Target is a good movie without it. Hard Target is a sublime movie because it’s there.

I feel like I’d be lying if I said this was my favorite John Woo film, but it’s the one I find the most titillating, if that makes sense, this unbelievable genius of a filmmaker, a poet of gunplay, directing his first Hollywood movie, the studio freaking out and hiring Sam Raimi as something of an insurance director when it turned out Woo didn’t want to make a martial arts movie. Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” is about a wealthy man who ends up as another wealthy man’s prey — Hard Target keeps the murder pervert aristocracy and makes their prey homeless veterans. It’s tough to take this too seriously since Van Damme’s Chase Boudreaux is among them despite being lit like he’s in a cologne commercial, but it’s a big swing for a director to make in a film that could have made or broken not only his career, but other Hong Kong directors’ prospects for directing in Hollywood, and it’s honestly surprising how respectfully Woo approaches the subject considering that the film around it is a cartoon.

Van Damme is incredible as his protagonist — I don’t know that any of the big action stars of the time would have been half as good as Chance. It helps that he’s lithe enough to keep up with Woo’s ideas, but mostly what I love about Van Damme here is his roguish charm. He plays Boudreaux as two kinds of Han Solo: one who everybody wants to fuck and one who doesn’t fuck at all, sexy and sexless in equal measure. Woo tried to get Kurt Russell for the role and it’s easy to see Boudreaux as Jack Burton or Snake Plissken but instead we got Jean-Claude Van Damme trying to do a Cajun accent, trying to act when he he’s been brought to set to kick ass, a perfect fit for a Hollywood take on heroic bloodshed.

It’s a great movie. It may not belong on “the great films of cinema” list, but it should definitely be on this one.