Before leaving his native Hong Kong, John Woo had already established an international reputation as one of the most exciting action film directors in world cinema. Naturally, Hollywood eventually came calling, luring him westward with the promise of bigger projects and bigger paydays. It would take a few attempts to get there. First, he’d make an inauspicious American debut with the silly Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Hard Target.
To give the “Muscles from Brussels” some credit, Van Damme has always seemed fully aware of both his strengths and limitations as a movie star, and was ahead of the curve in picking out talent from Hong Kong to work on his movies in America (Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark being other notable examples). Looking at it as the star’s project above all else, Hard Target may actually be one of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s best films, even if it’s pretty low on the scale for John Woo.
| Title: | Hard Target |
| Year of Release: | 1993 |
| Director: | John Woo |
| Watched On: | 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray |
| Also Available On: | Blu-ray Various VOD rental and purchase platforms |
Set in a bizarre version of New Orleans where the streets are almost always empty and the entire city only ever has one police officer on duty (a very quick shot tells us that the rest are on strike, and that issue is never mentioned again), Hard Target is a 1990s update of that old yarn The Most Dangerous Game. Lance Henriksen and Arnold Vosloo play the main villains, a pair of mercenary contractors running an outfit that offers rich scumbags the opportunity to hunt live human targets – specifically, down-on-their-luck homeless veterans with some military experience (to make the hunt a little sporting) but that nobody will miss when they end up dead.
As it turns out, however, their last victim had a daughter named Nat (Yancy Butler) who arrives from out of town looking for her dad. When she can’t find him on her own, and worse, runs into some of the city’s dangerous criminal element, Nat hires beefcake drifter Chance Boudreaux (Van Damme) to act as bodyguard and help her search. Before long, they wind up on the run themselves, with dozens of heavily-armed goons hunting them from the outskirts of the city, through the bayou, to an old factory or mill or something that has a bunch of Mardi Gras floats stored in it for some reason. Luckily, Boudreaux is pretty handy with a gun, and when he doesn’t have a gun, he’s even better at kicking bad guys in the face, which he does a lot!
Hard Target is an entirely ridiculous movie. It has a dumb plot, bad dialogue, and cartoonish characters. A stiff actor even at his best, Van Damme is further hampered by attempting a Cajun accent, and his greasy mullet was pretty questionable even in 1993. Wilford Brimley, from Cocoon and countless Quaker Oats commercials, shows up halfway through the picture as a moonshine-swilling hermit named Douvee (sound it out; it’s a groaner) with an even more outlandish accent, who goes full Deliverance on Henriksen and his boys to help out Chance.
Most of the action and stunts in the first half to two-thirds of the film are very over-the-top and ludicrous, but more so of Van Damme’s oeuvre than Woo’s. Chance does a lot of somersault leaping and kicking guys in the head. A bit where he “surfs” on a motorcycle is a real howler, and almost feels like it would have been at home in an Andy Sidaris movie. (For that matter, the part where Van Damme punches a snake definitely seems inspired by Sidaris.) The only things that feel “John Woo” about any of this are the excessive use of slo-mo and the occasional dove fluttering through the scene.
Not until the big action climax in the last half-hour does Hard Target really start to feel like a proper John Woo movie. That’s when the close-quarters automatic weapons combat takes over, and the director finally gets to indulge in the “heroic bloodshed” tropes he was famous for and actually good at delivering. Whether that’s enough to liven up an otherwise routine JCVD action flick may depend on whether you come at the film from the perspective of a Van Damme fan excited to get a more competent than usual outing from the star, or a John Woo fan expecting more from the man who made The Killer and Hard-Boiled.
The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Hard Target was first released on Blu-ray by Universal Studios in 2013. That disc was repackaged and reissued a few times before the movie was eventually licensed out to Kino Lorber at the end of 2021 for new Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray editions. Both copies were promoted at that time as being sourced from a “New 4K restoration of the unrated international cut of the film from the original camera negative.”
I don’t have the older Universal Blu-ray for comparison. Looking at the new 4K disc, image sharpness and grain resolution vary from shot to shot. In any given scene, some shots will have no grain at all while others will have a coarse coating of it. Signs of digital processing such as Noise Reduction or electronic sharpening are occasionally apparent, but they’re generally not too heavy-handed or distracting. The 1.85:1 picture is very bright, but colors can look a little overcranked at times, with skin tones that veer towards orange.
Although uneven, the disc is quite watchable. Close-ups in particular (and the movie has lots of those) can look pretty impressive. I switched over to the standard Blu-ray in the case afterward, and that disc is a decided downgrade in appearance.
When first released, the 4K disc was discovered to have an error in the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack that resulted in the left and right front channels being switched. Kino Lorber had to offer a disc replacement program for that. The corrected track is very loud, with sharp sound effects and active surround channels, but dynamic range is just okay and could be better. Crashes and explosions are underwhelming. Back in 1993, this movie was an early title to be released to theaters with the then-new DTS sound format, which was pretty famous at the time for goosing the bass to ear-bleeding levels. The current mix doesn’t reflect that.
An alternate DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track sounds to be out of phase and bleeds dialogue to all speakers if you apply an upmixer. Avoid that one.
The only extra on the 4K disc is an audio commentary by film writer Brandon Bentley and bonus feature content producer Mike Leeder. (The packaging and disc menu list them as “Action Film Historians.”) Despite neither having any direct connection to the movie, it’s a very listenable conversation.
In addition to that, the Blu-ray disc in the case also contains new interviews with John Woo, Lance Henriksen, Yancy Butler, and the film’s stunt coordinator, as well as one trailer for Hard Target and several more trailers for unrelated Kino home video titles.
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Note: All screenshots on this page were taken from the standard Blu-ray edition of the film and are used for illustration purposes only.
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