Hard Target (1993)Â
Hard Target is a 1993 American action film directed by Hong Kong film director John Woo in his U.S. debut. The film stars Jean-Claude Van Damme as Chance Boudreaux, an out-of-work Cajun merchant seaman who saves a young woman named Natasha Binder (Yancy Butler) from a gang of thugs in New Orleans. Chance learns that Binder is searching for her missing father (Chuck Pfarrer), and agrees to aid Binder in her search. They soon learn that Binder’s father has died at the hands of hunt organisers Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) and Pik van Cleef (Arnold Vosloo), ruthless businessmen who arrange the hunting of homeless men as a form of recreational sport. The screenplay was written by Pfarrer and is based on the 1932 film adaptation of Richard Connell’s 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game”.
Hard Target was Woo’s first U.S. film and was also the first major Hollywood film made by a Chinese director. Universal Pictures was nervous about having Woo direct a feature, and sent in director Sam Raimi to look over the film’s production and to take Woo’s place as director if he were to fail. Woo went through several scripts finding mostly martial arts films with which he was not interested. After deciding on Pfarrer’s script for Hard Target, Woo wanted to have actor Kurt Russell in the lead role, but found Russell too busy with other projects. Woo then went with Universal’s initial choice of having Van Damme star. Woo got along with Van Damme during filming and raised the amount of action in the film as he knew that the actor was up for it.
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Plot.
In New Orleans, a homeless veteran named Douglas Binder (Chuck Pfarrer) is the target of a hunt. He is given a belt containing $10,000 and told that he must reach the other side of the town to win the money and his life. Pursuing him is the hunt organizer Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen), his lieutenant Pik van Cleef (Arnold Vosloo), a businessman named Mr. Lopacki – Fouchon’s client who has paid $500,000 for the opportunity to hunt a human, and mercenaries including Stephan (Sven-Ole Thorsen) and Peterson (Jules Sylvester). Binder fails to reach his destination and is killed by three crossbow bolts. Van Cleef retrieves the money belt. While searching for her father, Binder’s estranged daughter Natasha (Yancy Butler) is attacked by a group of muggers who saw that she had a lot of cash earlier.
She is saved by a homeless man with exceptional martial arts skills named Chance Boudreaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme), a former Force Recon Marine. Chance is initially hesitant to involve himself in her mission, but as his merchant seaman union dues are in arrears, he reluctantly allows Natasha to hire him as her guide and bodyguard during her search.
Natasha discovers that her father distributed fliers for a seedy recruiter named Randal Poe (Eliott Keener) who has been secretly supplying Fouchon with homeless men with war experience and no family ties. Natasha questions Randal about her father’s death, but they are discovered by an eavesdropping Van Cleef. Fouchon and Van Cleef beat Randal and cut his ear as a punishment for sending them a man with a daughter.
New Orleans police detective Marie Mitchell (Kasi Lemmons) is reluctant to investigate Binder’s disappearance until his charred body is discovered in the ashes of a derelict building. The death is deemed an accident, but Chance searches the ruins and finds Binder’s dog tag, which was pierced by one of the crossbow bolts. Van Cleef’s henchmen suddenly ambush Chance and beat him unconscious to scare him and Natasha out of town. When he recovers, he offers Mitchell the dog tag as evidence that Binder was murdered. With the investigation getting closer, Van Cleef and Fouchon decide to relocate their hunting business and begin eliminating “loose ends”. The medical examiner who had been hiding the evidence of the hunt is executed along with Randal. Meanwhile, Chance’s homeless friend Elijah Roper (Willie C. Carpenter)
is the next to participate in Fouchon’s hunt and also ends up dead. Mitchell, Natasha and Chance arrive moments later at Randal’s car and are ambushed by Van Cleef and several of his men. During the shootout, Mitchell is shot in the chest and dies. Chance kills a handful of the mercenaries and escapes with Natasha. Fouchon and Van Cleef assemble their mercenary team and five hired hunters to continue the chase.
Chance leads Natasha to his uncle Douvee’s (Wilford Brimley) house deep in the bayou and enlists his help to defeat the men. Chance, Natasha, and Douvee lead the hunting party to “Mardi Gras graveyard” (a warehouse of old damaged Mardi Gras floats
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and statues) and kill off Fouchon’s men one by one. Van Cleef is finally gunned down by Chance in a shootout. In the end, only Fouchon is left, but he holds Chance at bay by taking Natasha hostage and stabbing Douvee in the chest with his arrow. Chance charges him, attacking with a flurry of blows, and then drops a grenade in his pants. Fouchon attempts in vain to dismantle the grenade but gets incinerated in the explosion.
It turns out that Douvee is still alive as the arrow Fouchon used only hit Douvee’s wine flask. Chance, Natasha, and Douvee make their way out of the warehouse.
Filming.Â
Filming began on October 1, 1992. Hard Target had 74 days of production time and was shot on location in New Orleans, including sequences shot in the French Quarter. Hard Target was put on a tight schedule by Universal that allowed only 65 days of shooting time. This put a lot of pressure on Woo. Woo was also pressured by Universal to tone-down the violence and body count that they had seen in his Hong Kong films. As Woo had not mastered the English language yet, it took time for the cast and crew to get used to working with him. When Woo could not explain what he wanted with a shot to cinematographer Russell Carpenter,
he would resort to simple statements such as “this will be the Sam Peckinpah shot” to get his message across to Carpenter. Actor Lance Henriksen recalled that it was a gradual process that led everyone involved to start seeing the film as a John Woo film rather than a Jean-Claude Van Damme film. Producer James Jacks recalled that Woo was not “the most powerful person on the set but as far as I was concerned, he was certainly the most respected.
The weapon fire on the set was considered dangerous, which led the crew to build a new bulletproof plexiglas shield that could be bolted to the camera. This shield was useful particularly for one sequence in Hard Target where Van Damme empties a magazine of ammo into the camera.
These camera dollies were nicknamed by the crew as “the Woo-Woo Choo-Choo”. Russell Carpenter found difficulty in filming the huge gunfight scenes. Carpenter specifically noted the Mardi Gras parade warehouse by recollecting that “just the lighting for a space like that, with all those strange shapes and shadows was difficult enough, but John then added the further complication of wanting the scene shot from several angles at once—often with more than one of the cameras moving”. Producer James Jacks supported this style of filming finding it the most economical way to shoot these types of action scenes.
Box office.
The film premiered in cinemas on August 20, 1993, in wide release throughout the U.S.. During its opening weekend, the film opened in second place grossing $10,106,500 in business showing at 1,972 locations. The film The Fugitive came in first place during that weekend grossing $18,148,331. Hard Target ‘s revenue dropped by 50% in its second week of release, earning $5,027,485. For that weekend, the film fell to third place, even with an increased screening count of 1,999 theaters. The Fugitive remained unchallenged in first place grossing $14,502,865 in box office revenue.RELATED:
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During its final week in release, Hard Target opened in a distant eleventh place with $1,270,945 in revenue. For that particular weekend, Striking Distance starring Bruce Willis made its debut, opening in first place with $8,705,808 in revenue. The film went on to top out domestically at $32,589,677 in total ticket sales through a 5-week theatrical run. Internationally, the film took in an additional $41,600,000 in box office business for a combined worldwide total of $74,189,677. For 1993 as a whole, the film worldwide would cumulatively rank at a box office performance position of 23.
Cast:
- Jean-Claude Van Damme as Chance Boudreaux
- Lance Henriksen as Emil Fouchon
- Arnold Vosloo as Pik Van Cleef
- Yancy Butler as Natasha Binder
- Kasi Lemmons as Detective Maria
- Chuck Pfarrer as Douglas Binder
- Willie C. Carpenter as Elijah Roper
- Wilford Brimley as Uncle Clarence Douvee
- Sven-Ole Thorsen as Stephan
- Jules Sylvester as Peterson
- Robert Apisa as Lopacki
- Tom Lupo as Jerome
- David Efron as Billy Bob
- Joe Warfield as Ismael Zenan
- Eliott Keener as Randal Poe
- Douglas Forsythe Rye as Frick
- Mike Leinert as Frack
- Marco St. John as Dr. Morton
- Lenore Banks as Marie, Binder’s Landlady
- Randy Cheramie as Shop Steward
- Jeanette Kontomitras as Madam
- Ted Raimi as Man On The Street
Jean-Cloude Van Damme 🔥🔥🔥
Hard Target remains my favorite movie.
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