Premise - Hard Target tells the story of a group of
people who run a business in New Orleans. It's kind of like a violent
paintball, where rich men pay half a million dollars to hunt homeless
people to the death. Of course JCVD can't have any off that and sets out
to stop them.
I'm a sucker for a good action film and Hard Target
IS a good action film.
I'm also no fan of JCVD; he has been in
some of the most risible pieces of claptrap that have ever dared to enter
my VCR. Hard Target however is for my money his best film. The reason I
rate Hard Target so highly? Two words -
John Woo.
Hard
Target was my entry point for John Woo, before this I had never given in
to the delights of The Killer or Hard Boiled, in-fact I had never heard of
them. But after seeing Hard Target I had to find more work from this
incredible artist who seemed to make action scenes jump off the screen.
Scenes shot with such care and attention that they became like a dance.
Violent, brutal, yes, but at the same time beautiful.
Now Hard
Target is in no way going to win any statues for acting honours, JCVD is a
walking piece of wood, who only seems to come alive when the
shooting/kicking starts. Yancy Butler has only two expressions puzzled and
shocked. The 'bad guy's' however were slightly more interesting. Arnold
Vosloo and Lance Henriksen (One of my favourite 'genre' actors. Millennium
Ruled!) run the paintball company and are deliciously evil.
It's
in the direction though that this film really comes alive. Slo-mo, doves,
implausible stunts, fire, two-gun madness, all John Woo's trademarks are
there to be loved.
Until Face-Off this was Woo's best USA work, I
might even go as far to say I like it better than MI:2 which felt like he
was being stifled. Woo on autopilot if you will.
I'm not going to
apologise for liking Hard Target, it introduced me to one of modern
cinema's great directors and for that it should be congratulated.
