Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Yancy
Butler, Lance Henriksen, Arnold Vosloo, Wilford Brimley, Kasi Lemmons, Willie
C. Carpenter
Director: John Woo
Action Director: Billy Burton[1]
Author Richard Connell’s 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game” (aka “The Hounds of Zaroff”) has exerted a lot of influence on B-movies. And why not? The very idea of a seasoned hunter growing bored with conventional big game hunting and wanting to branch out is timeless. And even if you are not a big game hunter, any one who watches the news regularly will undoubtedly walk away wishing to hunt someone for sport.
The first adaptation of the story the eponymous The Most Dangerous Game (1932), filmed on the sets of King Kong and with much of the same cast. It was later remade by RKO in the 1940s as The Game of Death. The 1956 adventure film Run for the Sun, starring Richard Widmark and Trevor Howard, has some of that same influence: former Nazis hunt an innocent man and woman through the Central American jungle. Bloodlust! (1959) has largely been forgotten, but can easily be found in different public domain DVD collections. It is of interest to genre fans for its proto-gore.
The rise of the MPAA rating system and the general liberalization of movie content standards in much of the Western world in the late 60s meant that later adaptations could be just as violent as the “humans hunting humans” premise might be. In 1973, Spanish exploitation auteur Jesus Franco made the sexed-up The Perverse Countess, which adds lesbian sex and cannibalism to the mix. The Ozploitation film Turkey Shoot (1982) placed the hunt for the “deadliest prey” in a dystopian future, as did Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man (1988), while David A. Prior’s Deadly Prey (1987) inserted the material into the then-popular “bodybuilder with a machine gun” context. The American Ninja himself, Michael Dudikoff, also got in on the action in Avenging Force (1987).
The early 1990s saw a handful of adaptations of varying quality. Before Hard Target, we got Death Ring (19920, which enticed viewers with big names like Swayze, Norris and McQueen, only for them to discover that the filmmakers meant Don, Mike and Chad, respectively. Hard Target came out in 1993 and was successful enough to inspire a few copycats. Surviving the Game (1994) featured a game cast (Ice-T, Rutger Hauer, Charles S. Dutton and F. Murray Abraham) but no martial arts. The dystopian prison movie No Escape (1994) with Ray Liotta has some elements of Connell’s story, although it shares more with the mostly forgotten 1973 film Terminal Island (which featured a young Tom Selleck).
Some recent takes on the material have generally moved away from the action and focused on the horror angle. Naked Fear (2007) has its lead actress Danielle De Luca being hunted through the American Southwest whilst completely nude. The recent Purge films—now numbering five—are very Zaroff in their execution, especially the more recent The Forever Purge. Rob Zombie’s 31 (2016) is also a more horror take on the premise, with various psychopaths hunting random nobodies for sport on Halloween night for the amusement of the elite. Films like The Hunger Games series and Battle Royale pit teenagers against each other in battles to the death, in which the stronger and/or more psychotic participants end up hunting the weaker or more compassionate individuals. Recently, the satiric horror film The Hunt (2020) got a lot of controversy for its premise of rich Liberals hunting Conservatives.
Hard Target was John Woo’s first Hollywood movie, released four years before the turnover of Hong Kong. There was a lot of insecurity at the time as to whether the PRC would respect the Basic Law (which would leave Hong Kong more or less the same for 50 years) or start censoring stuff right off the bat. A number of actors and filmmakers sought their fortunes in Hollywood, with John Woo easily being the most successful director of the pack. This also solidified the unwritten rule that a Hong Kong action director wishing to move to Hollywood would have to undergo the initiation rite of making a Van Damme movie. This had started back in 1985 with No Retreat, No Surrender and would continue in force until 1998, when Kirk Wong made The Big Hit.
Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen of Excessive Force and No Escape) and Pik Van Cleaf (Arnold Vosloo of The Mummy Returns) are a pair of venture capitalists with a novel idea: why is it that in the realm of killing, the honor mainly goes to soldiers, police officers, and the like? Why can’t rank and file enjoy that privilege as well? So, why not round up some a homeless person—and just to make things more exciting, a homeless veteran—and let him loose on the playing field for a man to hunt? Of course, just to make the client gets his money’s worth, have a small team of motorcyclists and hitmen help keep the quarry within the confines of the playing field? And you know, pay off the coroner just to make sure those pesky authorities don’t get in the way.
Well, Fouchon and Van Cleaf’s business has been quite successful for a number of years, with them setting up hunts in South America and Eastern Europe, among other places. They are currently working out of New Orleans, which has no shortage of Vietnam vets living on the street. Unfortunately for them, their latest victim was not so forgotten by society so as to have nobody looking for him. Due to an oversight by their recruiter, phone sex kingpin Randall Poe, their latest trophy was a recently self-evicted man who had maintained correspondence with his daughter, a big city lawyer named Natasha (Yancy Butler of the Lake Placid sequels).
Natasha, or “Nat”, soon shows up in New Orleans looking for her dad. She hires a down-on-his-luck merchant marine (and former Special Forces operative) named Chance Boudreaux (Van Damme) to help her in her search. Boudreaux is sharp enough to figure out that Randall is involved in the disappearance of Nat’s father, which will eventually put him at odds with Fouchon and Van Cleaf. And once the bullets start flying, it isn’t long before our murderous capitalists chase Nat and Boudreaux into the bayou. Once our antagonists lose the home field advantage, the question stands: Who exactly is hunting whom?
Hard Target regularly enters people’s lists of their Top 3 Van Damme movies. Ironically, it conversely is considered a lesser John Woo movie, especially in comparison to everything Woo had made from A Better Tomorrow (1986) to Hard Boiled a year before. Woo brings a huge helping of style to the proceedings, filling the movie with gratuitous slo-mo, dove shots, and every other post-Ying Hung Boon Sik Woo-ism you can imagine. Woo’s male bonding elements—which he got from Chang Cheh--are also present, although in this case, they apply to villains Fouchon and Van Cleaf. Both Lance Henriksen and Arnold Vosloo (still six years from making The Mummy) have a lot of chemistry as a pair of men—partners in crime in both senses of the term--brimming with professional respect for one another. And both men make for more intimidating (and compelling) villains than the usual Triad head honchos that populate Woo’s more lauded Heroic Bloodshed movies.
While some people complain that John Woo’s stylistic touches border on self-parody here, they elevate what might have been an otherwise stale (or passable at best) Van Damme movie actioner. Imagine this in the hands of an Albert Pyun type and you get the picture. The excessive slow motion photography may look cheesy at times, but it gives the limited martial arts action more “umph!” and instead of looking static, it becomes cool. The gunplay in Universal Soldier was nothing to write home about, but with John Woo’s handling of large-scale stunts, Hard Target features some of the better gun-oriented set pieces in a Hollywood film prior to The Matrix.
Woo and stunt coordinator Billy Burton (Dick Tracy and Year of the Dragon) are also smart to never allow the action to grow stale. There are some moments of hand-to-hand exchanges and slow-motion spin kicks, but that doesn’t define action—John Woo hadn’t done a pure martial arts film since 1978. There are also vehicle-foot chases, car-motorcycle chases, helicopter-horse chases, death-defying leaps, and explosions galore! There are a number of moments here where Woo references Hard Boiled, such as Van Damme pinning a guy to the wall with a motorcycle and Lance Henriksen’s using a Thompson Center Arms Contender single-shot pistol, which Philip Kwok's Mad Dog used in that film.
If you have seen enough of Van Damme’s early films, you’ll notice that he usually plays Americans, but the writers have to find reasons for him to speak with a Belgian accent. In Bloodsport and Universal Soldier, he’s the son of French immigrants. In Kickboxer and Double Impact, he was raised in Europe for…reasons. In Sudden Death and Death Warrant, he is (presumably) French Canadian. Only in Lionheart is it suggested that he was ethnic French. In Hard Target, he is from Louisiana and was raged by a Cajun uncle (unlikely, but welcome, action movie stalwart Wilford Brimley) on the bayous. Van Damme gives a solid performance in a script that mainly requires to him to flex his muscles, throw kicks and shoot guns, and project an aura of cool. He handles that with enough aplomb--along with strong performances from Brimley, Henriksen and Vosloo--to make up for Yancy Butler’s monotonous performance. Those four doing what they do best, along with Kwok and Woo doing what they do best (even if not to the level of their Hong Kong fare) makes this an unmissable moment in Hollywood action cinema.[1] - Philip Kwok, who had worked on Hard Boiled, was
originally going to be the action director. In an interview between Toby
Russell and Philip Kwok, Kwok said: "Yes, I was all scheduled to go and be
his stunt coordinator but there was a problem with the stunt union saying that
as I was a non union man I couldn't work on the picture." (http://poisonclanrockstheworld.blogspot.com/1995/10/interview-with-philip-kwok.html)
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