But for the hunted downtrodden of the city, there’s never been anything easy about The Big Easy.Īs is the case with any movie, great casting is at the heart of its success. As action film historians Brandon Bentley and Mike Leeder say in their recently recorded audio commentary track, it’s The Most Dangerous Game in New Orleans. Their literal game is class warfare, the well-armed rich hunting the desperate and forgotten homeless in the urban open, for pure sport. With the quick establishment that the local police are currently on strike, a crew of lethal murderous sickos are even more emboldened. The film makes bold, excellent use of its well-chosen New Orleans setting. The result is Hard Target– nothing more, and absolutely nothing less- than a fully rollicking, wildly entertaining action movie to watch on a weekend afternoon. It just so happened that Van Damme’s ascension overlapped with Woo’s arrival in the states, allowing their paths to cross via the maneuvering of one of the film’s executive producers, Sam Raimi. Hard Target, as humble as it reads in terms of budget and scope (by large Hollywood studio standards, anyhow), has such grandiosity to spare. When he windmill kicks a guy in the head in slow motion, it’s a moment that is uniquely his. (See: Broken Arrow, Mission: Impossible II, Windtalkers, and the sleepy sci-fi, Paycheck).Īs for Van Damme, the so-called “Muscles from Brussels”- he’s admittedly barely an actor here, but fortunately this movie does not require any deep emoting on his part. Going forward in Hollywood, this would so often not altogether be the case. Hard Target, his American debut, looks and feels in every sense like “a John Woo movie”. For a time, his aesthetic dominated action movies all around the globe.

At his best, it’s that exact style of romanticized graphic novel-esque fisticuffs and firearms that the man is a master of. Nevertheless, as revelatory as Woo’s meticulous cool was for American eyes at the time, it’s now a part of yet another an era gone by.īut doggonit, when you sit down to take in a John Woo picture, such exquisite flair should be exactly what you want. Here, Woo did not yield his best work (for that, see his native masterworks Hard Boiled, The Killer, and A Better Tomorrow), but he did manage to give the genre a much-needed jolt. As ‘80s steroid-y action gave way to the swifter martial arts action popular in the ‘90s, the director- so revered in his native Hong Kong- was lured, at long last, to the states. Woo’s melodramatic ballets of bullets and overwrought dove symbolism now register as work that’s quickly becoming encrusted in amber. Why didn’t anyone tell me that Hard Target is so much fun? Sure, it stars Jean-Claude Van Damme in his A-list heyday, and yes, it’s one of the legendary John Woo’s early Hollywood efforts… but why have some of us collectively swallowed the assumption that both of those are negatives?

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