Natasha Binder (Yancy Butler) is looking for her daddy. She hasn’t seen him for twenty years, since he walked out on her mother. Natasha discovers that he’s been living on the streets. We know from the opening sequence that something really bad has happened to him.
Natasha is an accident waiting to happen in the big city. It’s not that she’s dumb but she’s not a city girl and in this movie New Orleans is like a post-apocalyptic wasteland in the making. She’s way out of her depth and almost immediately she gets herself into big trouble with a gang of hoods who don’t just intend to rob her. She doesn’t know why this big tough guy rescues her but he does. We will soon find out that the big tough guy is Chance Boudreaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme).
Natasha hires him to help her find her dad because she’s smart enough to realise she needs someone who knows the city and she needs a minder. Her woman’s instincts tell her she can trust this man. And she’s right.
Her father was tricked into playing a deadly game where he was the prey being stalked by bored psychos who like the idea of hunting men. And as a former Special Forces soldier they figured he’d make challenging prey.
Chance starts to work out what happened and soon he and Natasha are being stalked. Chance has been chosen as the latest prey.
The hunters, and there are lots of them, have motorcycles and helicopters and grenades and automatic weapons and Chance is just one guy. But he is Jean-Claude Van Damme so that makes the odds pretty even! And he is not likely to just sit back and allow himself to be hunted.
That’s basically all the plot there is but it’s enough.
Much mayhem ensues.
John Woo is obviously a guy who believes that nothing succeeds like excess and the more excess you have the better you’ll succeed. He gives us lots of excess in this movie. There are explosions. Millions of rounds of small arms ammunition are expended. There are more explosions. There’s martial arts action. Action on horseback. Action with motorcycles and helicopters. And bows and arrows, and venomous snakes. And more explosions.
All handled with incredible style and energy. The finale in the warehouse full of Mardi Gras floats is wild.
Once you accept the premise the movie makes sense. Chance isn’t just a regular Joe, he’s ex-Special Forces so it’s believable that he’s an awesome fighting machine. And it makes sense that he would take on a whole army of bad guys even though he doesn’t owe the girl anything and it wasn’t his fight to start with. Her father was a military veteran, and Chance is a vet as well. And we find out right at the start that he doesn’t like seeing powerful people picking on powerless people and he really doesn’t like seeing women being picked on. If a woman needs help that’s something a man can’t just walk away from. Not a man like Chance anyway.
The psychos hunting men as big game are trying to prove their manhood but Chance understands what real manhood entails.
Van Damme has the necessary charisma. He’s in fine form. And the bad guys are led by two totally evil totally crazy larger-than-life super-villains - Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) and van Cleaf (Arnold Vosloo). Yancy Butler as Natasha is likeable enough and not at all irritating. She doesn’t have GirlPower fantasies - she’s happy to accept Chance’s help and protection.
This is like a fever dream post-apocalyptic western with dashes of Mad Max but set in a totally dysfunctional New Orleans. The action never lets up, which is as it should be. Hard Target is a very superior action movie and it’s very highly recommended.
The earliest adaptation of the Richard Connell famous story is The Most Dangerous Game (1932) which is excellent. Another notable version is Turkey Shoot (1982) and there have been some weird and crazy versions that are well worth seeing, such as Confessions of a Psycho Cat (1968) and Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity (1987).
No comments:
Post a Comment