John Woo’s Hard Target Remains a Wild Ride 30 Years Later

John Woo's Hard Target Remains a Wild Ride 30 Years Later

Released 30 years ago, the film marks Woo’s first trip to America to make a film for a major American studio (in this case, Universal Pictures), and therefore marks an important transition point in the star’s career. Woo was already a world-renowned action master with films like The Killer, A Better Tomorrow and Hard Boiled. No one on the planet could pull off a gunfight like John Woo, and his Heroic Bloodshed films, full of incredible stunts, explosions and highly stylized shots, had already made him an action movie institution. The trip to America was inevitable, and three decades later, the fruits of that first voyage across the Pacific are still worth your time.

A loose adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game, Hard Target follows a former Marine and occasional sailor named Chance Boudreaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme) as he drifts through New Orleans, eventually falling into the orbit of Natasha Binder (Yancy Butler), a woman desperate to find her estranged father. What Natasha doesn’t know is that her father is already dead, having been hired by criminal mastermind Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) to participate in a human hunt for sport, which he did not survive. What begins as a murder mystery soon becomes a fight for their lives, as Chance and Natasha must stay ahead of Fouchon and his men, or become the targets themselves.

Hard Target 1993 Cast: Then and Now | Real Name and Age (29 Years After)

By the time of Hard Target, Van Damme was already a major star, which meant that even in Wu’s presence, he was the one who had the magnetic pull. Van Damme fits perfectly with Woo’s over-the-top action style and his dramatic, sometimes overwrought staging style. It served Woo well that he found an action star who never shied away from stunt work and seemed to be made of stretchy cloth, able to jump and kick in ways that his peers on the American action scene often simply couldn’t. And it served Van Damme well that he had a director who never wanted to rein him in, who wanted to highlight every little detail of his star’s abilities.

Then there’s the other major character in Hard Target: the city of New Orleans. It makes sense that Woo would be drawn to this place. Like his Hong Kong home, it’s a port city and cultural melting pot with a distinctive personality, full of strange detours and visually dynamic sights. It has the feeling of being a place where just about anything could happen, which of course gives the director the opportunity to make just about anything happen. There’s no doubt a heightened, exaggerated reality is at work in the film, but when Woo goes to work, you get the sense that New Orleans, like Hong Kong, is an almost magical space where just about any crazy thing could happen.

And yes, crazy things happen. Hard Target contains two of the most memorable (and memorable) moments of weird action movie bravado of Woo’s entire career, moments you’ll see even if you’ve never seen the film. For example, in this film we saw Wilford Brimley riding a horse away from an exploding building, as well as a film in which Van Damme knocked a snake unconscious with one punch. Beyond that, it features Van Damme surfing on a moving motorcycle, a climactic shootout on a Mardi Gras floating warehouse, and, of course, some of Van Damme’s highest and most incredible kicks, all delivered in Woo’s slow-motion, stylized manner. . It’s not necessarily a masterpiece by John Woo standards, but it’s a hugely entertaining action extravaganza, and 30 years later it still holds up.