Welcome to my recurring Five-Star Three-Star Cinema Club column, in which I am out in search of that rare delight: the five-star three-star movie. Inspired by my post about 1996’s Twister, and expanded upon in a follow-up post, the idea here is to build out a canon of movies that are not exactly great, and certainly not transcendent, but are great at being the exact kind of perfect mediocrity you sometimes crave on a Sunday afternoon.
I’m watching Hard Target again. Right now. As I type this. I just put it on, my second time today, in fact. I was in the mood to write about another five-star three-star masterpiece, so I put it to the fine folks on Bluesky, and the first person to reply was Jamelle Bouie, with just two words: “HARD TARGET.” Bouie is an extraordinarily smart writer and cereal connoisseur, and he’s usually correct. In this case? 100% correct. Nobody else needed bother suggesting options. because I knew what I had to do. Early this morning, I woke up, busted out my copy of Hard Target on 4K Blu-ray—an incredible looking disc, though its Dolby Vision layer is authored in some strange, defective way that doesn’t play nice with my Panasonic player—and put the movie on while I attended to some piled-up work.
Hard Target was John Woo’s first American movie, and he put his whole ass into its mid-budget action. The budgets would grow—from $20 million to $50 million on Broken Arrow, and then $80 million on the great masterpiece, Face-Off, which I will surely cover here at some point—but on his debut outing, Woo proved Hollywood’s model of action movie filmmaking was entirely malleable. Universal, apparently nervous about Woo, brought Sam Raimi on as an executive producer to oversee the production, and potentially step in if things were going wrong. Nothing went wrong, and we got a Ted Raimi cameo as a result. A sure sign of greatness.
The film stars Jean-Claude Van Damme as a seaman in New Orleans who gets himself caught up in a conspiracy of rich hunters who prey on that dangerous game: homeless men. One of those men was the father of Natasha Binder, a woman played by Yancy Butler who arrived in town looking for her dad. Soon, Van Damme finds himself hunted, but little do those evil rich guys know, he’s a pretty hard target. Get it? This is a stupid movie. An extremely stupid movie. And in true ‘90s style, it has no pretenses. Hard Target is a movie designed to serve its action, not the other way around. There’s no art in its storytelling. Instead, it’s a showcase for what can be done when action is approached with clarity and style. It’s 95 minutes of pure purpose, and halfway through my second watch today, it’s a remarkably brisk 95 minutes at that.
Woo’s is a cinema of poses, drawn from the style of shooting so common in Hong Kong, in which sequences were constructed shot-to-shot, often right there on the set. Each image exists on its own. Stunts, explosions, doves, slow-motion reactions, inserts of guns reloading, all given the space for maximum impact. What Woo’s Hollywood money gets him is motorbike chases, wild explosions, helicopters chasing guys on horseback, and fire everywhere. That this was essentially pre-CGI makes the action that much more palpable. In one scene, Lance Henriksen, as the film’s big baddie, has his jacket catch fire, which barely seems to bother him before he manages to fling it off. You don’t see that sort of thing today, and probably for good reason, but it’s badass as fuck.
Hard Target has all the hallmarks of a shitty, direct-to-video action movie in a post-Commando world, except that Woo is a real artist, and his sense for what plays in an edit was unmatched at this stage in his career, coming off the iconic Hard Boiled. It also has the benefit of a great set of supporting players. Kasi Lemmons and Willie C. Carpenter are each a great presence. Then there’s Henriksen leaving it all on the table in his portrayal of an evil, rich maniac. Arnold Vosloo is his evil South African henchman, in his best role before playing the villain in The Mummy. Finally, there’s the most important character actor of them all: Wildford Brimley, playing Van Damme’s Cajun uncle, with full Cajun accent. He is, in a word, glorious.
If there’s one shot in Hard Target that exemplifies its greatness, it comes just as the movie is about to head into its third act, essentially one long chase followed by one long interior action sequence. Getting ready to face the hunters, Brimley throws Van Damme a shotgun. In the most majestic light imaginable, Van Damme looks at the weapon in his hands and then blows on it, sending dust flying off in glistening slow-motion.
There is no reason for this shot to be this cool, but John Woo strives to make every shot cool, and this is the coolest. It’s pure image in motion, communicating clearly the intent of the film, which is not to supply a visceral sort of action as might a James Cameron or Steven Spielberg, but a graphic action, built on gesture and pose. It’s not even an action scene, and yet it hits with the same force. That’s John Woo, who takes what should be a reasonably fun Van Damme joint and makes it cinema. Five-star three-star to the core. Might watch it again tomorrow.
The Five-Star Three Star Cinema Club Canon (so far):
Didn’t quite make the cut: