Film is Pwn

Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Yancy Butler, Lance Henriksen, Arnold Vosloo
Directed by: John Woo

As an added bonus, this isn’t just a blog on a Jean-Claude Van Damme film, this, my friends, is the legendary team-up of Van Damme and Hong Kong’s logic defying director John Woo, Hard Target! Before you get your expectations too high, Hard Target, like most John Woo or JCVD films, has one idea (seldom original or clever), a lot of action, and no brains.

The idea is that there are a group of bad guys, led by Lance Henriksen (looking much like an evil Conan O’Brien) and Arnold Vosloo (a.k.a. the Mummy from the Mummy), who run an operation that allows wealthy men to hunt and kill homeless combat veterans for sport. The film opens as we see the latest victim, Bluto from the Popeye cartoons, who falls to an arrow in the curiously vacant streets of New Orleans. One interesting fact learned from the movie involving New Orleans is that the city contains zero residents not required by the plot either at night or during the day. (I assume they saved money by not hiring any extras and used the additional funds to blow more stuff up.)

It turns out that Bluto had a daughter played by the lovely Yancy Butler, who comes looking for Daddy when his letters stop. Since she is playing the damsel in an action movie, she almost immediately finds herself in distress as four men try to rob her outside a crowded restaurant in the afternoon. Luckily, Van Damme is there to save the day with timely kickboxing and pseudo-quips (“This used to be such nice part of town”) that really wouldn’t count as witty rejoinders if Van Damme movies didn’t set the bar so doggone low when it comes to quips.

Van Damme’s character is a down and out dock worker who Butler then recruits to help her find Daddy. In the search, romantic sparks fly as they have this conversation:

Van Damme: “What’s your name?”
Butler: “It’s Nat.”
Van Damme: “Nat? Your parents name you for a . . . bug?”
Butler: “No, actually, it’s short for Natasha.”

The big break in the search is when they discover that Bluto used to hand out XXX fliers. Seeing the smutty fliers, Butler is understandably taken aback, but Van Damme assures her: “Don’t be offended. You pass them out for money.” *Phew!* As long as Daddy got money, I guess there’s no moral qualms, right?

Soon, Van Damme, Butler, and New Orleans’ only police officer (Kasi Lemmons) are about to blow the lid off the whole scandal before Henriksen and Vosloo decide to eliminate them. This leads to a forty minute fight/chase marathon that starts in the streets of New Orleans and goes to the bayou, with only a few breaks for Van Damme to set a booby trap with a live rattlesnake.

One of my favorite scenes is when Van Damme and Butler are on a motorcycle with a henchman coming straight at them on a bike of his own. Butler grabs the wheel, as Van Damme stands on the bike, firing away with his machine gun. The evil biker goes down, his bike skidding toward our oncoming heroes before the bike actually explodes as a result of action movie physics. Our heroes’ bike jumps through the explosion, and rams into the evil biker knocking him into conveniently stacked empty boxes, which seemed much further away in a shot five seconds earlier. Watch the jump through flames carefully and you’ll note that Van Damme’s stunt double’s hair looks suspiciously like a helmet rather than a mullet. If not for the liberal use of slow motion, this might not be as transparent. (Historical note: John Woo actually outdid himself with an even sillier villain-hero playing chicken on motorcycles showdown in the terrible Mission: Impossible II.)

John Woo uses slow motion more frequently than regular speed. He doesn’t just reserve the technique for action scenes, so that you can clearly see the pause between Van Damme’s feet breezing by a thug’s head before he falls down, Woo uses slow motion in completely innocuous moments such as Van Damme lighting a match or seeing a dove. The slow motion gets so out of hand that during the climactic confrontation Lance Henriksen actually yells, “Hey!” in slow motion on two different occasions.

It’s hard not to watch the last forty minutes without laughing at the absurdity. The only explanation I can think of is that John Woo and/or Jean-Claude Van Damme always wanted to film the following stunts and figured this might be their last chance, so they crammed all these in:

Van Damme rides a horse through the swamp as bad guys fire away at him from a helicopter. Van Damme swings on a rope like Tarzan and fires his gun. Van Damme rides a giant swan as he shoots bad guys (you think I’m kidding, but I’m not). Van Damme shoots a guy multiple times and THEN kicks him in the face; he likes this trick so much he does it again to a different, nameless thug. Van Damme jumps through a glass window, and we get to rewatch the action four different camera angles. Van Damme stuffs a grenade down a bad guy’s pants.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

An observation on John Woo’s reality: Where does he get the impression that everything struck by a bullet blows up and/or is launched into the air? Did he go to a firing range as a young man, shoot a paper target, and the target exploded into 4th of July fireworks as it hurtled twenty feet straight up in the air? I almost expected one of the heads to burst into flames after the fiftieth Van Damme spin kick.

Hard Target is so over-the-top that it is truly hysterical. This is the ultimate late night fun/bad movie experience. This film makes the recent Angelina Jolie-Morgan Freeman car wreck Wanted look like an exercise in restraint, though Wanted had the audacity to preach to its audience (“What the (hockey puck) have you done lately?” Wanted’s hero asks the audience after killing an enemy from a great distance, prompting me to respond, “I just wasted ten bucks on your crappy film!”), but Hard Target can be forgiven because its sole ambition is to blow things up.

In fact, why Henriksen asks Van Damme why he got involved in this affair, Van Damme’s answer is: “Poor people get bored too.” The audience can relate, because boredom is the primary reason to watch the film.

Did I mention that Wilford Brimley is Van Damme’s wacky, Cajun uncle? Brimley was ROBBED of an Academy Award for best supporting actor.