Hard Target was John Woo’s first big film in the United States and Hollywood, and it paired him with one of the top action stars of the early ’90s – Jean-Claude Van Damme, a star who was very much not known for his gunplay, and was much more known for his martial arts. It’s generally been held up as a rough start to Woo’s Hollywood run, but that said, I think it’s still an okay fun little action movie, even if it doesn’t reach up to the heights of his earlier Hong Kong career.

Van Damme plays Chance Boudreaux, a homeless Cajun veteran (and former Marine Force Recon) in New Orleans, who agrees to help young woman Natasha Binder (Yancy Butler) look for her missing homeless father. When it turns out that her father was coerced into being the prey in an underground hunting operation where homeless veterans are hunted by wealthy billionaires for sport, Boudreaux takes on the hunt’s organizers.

The story itself, while it takes very clear and transparent cues from the short story “The Most Dangerous Game” feel much more like a hardboiled detective story, with Boudreaux functionally taking the place of a private investigator. Boudreaux even gets roughed up for getting too close to what’s going on (which is honestly the hallmark of a hardboiled detective story). As written, Boudreaux really well fits the archetype from that Chandler quote – “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” Also, props to Van Damme for being willing to get hit (as opposed to Seagal).

Yancy Butler does a pretty good job in the film as well – a bunch of the romance scenes between Butler and Van Damme ended up on the cutting room floor in the final cut – and honestly I think that’s for the best. Having the two characters in a deep platonic friendship over shared trauma rather than a romantic relationship works well. Kasi Lemmons also has a very strong performance as a police detective who takes Butler’s concerns about her father’s death seriously – I kinda want to seek out more of her acting work (along with her directorial work).

Finally, on the acting front, we have two very strong actors here in villain roles – Lance Henriksen and Arnold Vosloo. Both absolutely understand the assignment for their respective roles. Vosloo is the nemesis who is, in terms of skill and ability, the villainous counterpart of the protagonist. While the action scenes aren’t staged in a way to make him the equal of Van Damme in martial arts, Vosloo is depicted well as being his equal in gunplay (to the point of giving him a few of Mad Dog’s beats from Hard Boiled in the final showdown). On the other hand, Hendriksen is the scenery-chewing villain who is passionate about the fight, but doesn’t have the skill to quite back it up, forcing him to be underhanded, but with enough pride where he doesn’t go so underhanded where it’s an easy win.

The action scenes themselves very much feel apace of Woo’s work in Hong Kong – the climactic showdown in a Marti Gras Parade Float graveyard doesn’t quite have the same flair as his showdowns in The Killer or Hard Boiled, but he does bring a few of the flourishes from those works into here. It makes for something of a teaser of what Woo would bring to the table for some of his later films in the US, particularly Face/Off and Mission: Impossible 2. The scenes where we do get some martial arts from Van Damme are also done fairly well – Woo had done martial arts and swordplay films in the past. That said, it does give a bit of an impression that Van Damme was underserved by the other directors and choreographers he worked with in the ’90s. He looks better her than I think he looked even in Bloodsport and certainly in Street Fighter, and I do really wish that he’d gotten opportunities to work with Yuen Woo-Ping, for example – though unfortunately a lot of those other Hong Kong martial arts directors didn’t make the jump until after The Matrix, which also was well after Van Damme’s prime.

In all, I enjoyed the movie a lot, and while it isn’t one of Woo’s greatest films, I would consider it one of Van Damme’s greatest films, and is absolutely worth your time.

The movie is available from Amazon.com with a very nice 4K release from Kino Lorber. Buying anything through that link will help support the site.

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