Sometimes, I miss the blissful ignorance of the video store era. It was a life experience it itself. There was an oddly limited choice of movies (because the one you wanted was inevitably rented, remember the empty rows of identical boxes missing?), the staggering number of boxes made it difficult to make a choice and if your local video store owner was lazy and didn't sell his own films, he ended up with a large selection of really strange movies *. I grew up passing by the cover of HARD TARGET at least once a week, but never renting it. It would've been a shamed if I didn't correct the situation, because this film is a goddamn gift to human race.
Some chick (Yancy Butler) drives to New Orleans, seeking her long lost father. All she finds is a corrupted, violent wasteland where people regularly have to break the law to get by. So she hires drifter Chance Boudreaux (Van Damme), for hilarious reasons we'll get to later, to help her find her dad. Chance takes about one morning to establish the old man's dead, but he stumbles upon a hornet's nest trying to figure out why. There is an illegal big game hunting circle going on in the streets of New Orleans. Someone is organizing underground bum safaris and picks army veterans down on their luck for targets. This kind of evil shit doesn't happen on Chance Boudreaux's watch.
HARD TARGET is the greatest pulp movie I've ever seen south of COBRA. It is so ridiculously awesome, you have to wonder if director John Woo wasn't fucking with us. It was his first American project after all. The best way I can describe it RENEGADE ** meets SURVIVING THE GAME, if John Woo was in a really hard Lorenzo Lamas throwback period of his life. Van Damme's character chance looks like Reno Raines' troubled little brother. Perhaps the most hilarious detail about Chance Boudreaux is that for the first 30 minutes of the movie, whenever he walks into the frame, soulful flamenco/bluegrass music is playing. Right off the bat, it annihilates any chance of you watching the movie seriously.
It's all in the music. Without the music, he's nothing.
I don't know where to start selling you this movie. There are so many great things about it. JCVD sports this amazing trench coat/pseudo-mullet combo that made him look mysterious in 1993. The criminal mastermind (Lance Henriksen) is so filthy rich and evil, he plays demented piano sonatas before client meetings. There is a random, retired, horseback riding Super Mario impersonator who has nothing to do with the storyline at some point. But my favorite scene is that absolutelty badass motorcycle chase/shootout scene that goes on forever, where JCVD displays every possible way you can kill a man using a motorcycle. At that point, I was doing cartwheels in my living room from the sheer awesomeness.
HARD TARGET is a perfect storm : great director with a sense of humor, a star who cannot act his way out of a paper bag, yet can spin kick anybody into oblivion and a script that would make Shakespeare turn over in his grave. HARD TARGET is not only a highlight of Jean-Claude Van Damme's career, it's also an underrated cult classic. It embodies everything great about the Belgian actor, thanks Mr. Woo. In hindsight, I'm sure two decades of perspective made HARD TARGET more enjoyable. Its content aged like fine wine and surfs the delicate line of irony in this day and age. God, I feel like rewatching every episode of RENEGADE right now. If you have one Van Damme movie to watch in your lifetime, make it HARD TARGET.
* I often dream I'm back in my old video store, browsing aisles of movies that don't exist, looking for something that doesn't exist either.