Five-Star Three-Star Cinema Club #5: Hard Target
A few words about Woo
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.
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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.