Control Nathan Rabin #249 Hard Target (1993)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
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There’s never a bad time to watch 1993’s Hard Target, John Woo’s American directorial debut and the best damn movie Jean-Claude Van Damme ever made. But I have been particularly tempted to revisit Hard Target thanks to the Travolta/Cage podcast and the Travolta/Cage Project.
New Orleans, or “N’Awlins”, as us colorful literary types like to call it, is the spiritual home of Travolta/Cage, both because it’s the home of Nicolas Cage’s tomb and because Cage made so many movies there, both great (Wild at Heart, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans) and decidedly less than great (Zandalee, Sonny, Seeking Justice, Stolen, Pay the Ghost, The Runner).
But I’ve also been tempted to re-watch Hard Target because it brought the future director of Broken Arrow and Face/Off to the United States to work his magic.
I’ve long revered Hard Target as a wildly overachieving Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle and warm up for Face/Off but this latest re-watch made me realize that it’s a legitimately great movie in its own right and not just notable for its relationship to Face/Off, one of the greatest movies ever made, regardless of genre.
When I see that a movie is set in New Orleans I reflexively roll my eyes, audibly sigh and think, “ANOTHER movie set in New Orleans? How many tax credits can one city offer?” That’s because most movies shot in the most libertine of American cities lean lazily on local color and flavorful accents because they have nothing else to offer.
Not Hard Target. Re-watching Woo’s badass cult classic I instead found myself thinking, “New Orleans is an amazing place to film a motion picture! It’s so colorful! And there are so many great places to shoot! Why isn’t every movie set in New Orleans?”
A terrific New Orleans movie as well as a perfect vehicle for Jean-Claude Van Damme, Hard Target unforgettably casts the Muscles from Brussels as Chance Boudreaux, a highly skilled former Marine who has fallen on hard times and is just barely scraping by with occasional work as a merchant seaman.
Since he is played by Van Damme, Chance is a high-flying, high-kicking man of action but because this is a John Woo movie he’s also a man of honor and integrity, a stand-up guy with a clear-cut moral code.
He's a street-smart champion of the underdog who still manages to look amazing despite a greasy mullet, trench coat and fondness for denim-on-denim ensembles.
Van Damme must have been pissed when he wasn’t cast in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split.
Above all else Chance is a working man, a proud member of the proletariat who sees every struggling veteran and drifter as his brother and sister. The wretched of the earth are Chance’s people, particularly when they are in the cross-hairs, literally and figuratively, of the very wealthy and very wicked.
The Ant Bully, the last entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0, is a Marxist manifesto that does not seem to realize that it has politics at all, let alone of the Marxism–Leninism variety. Hard Target is a different story altogether.
Like most versions of Richard Connell’s oft-filmed 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game, Hard Target is inherently class-conscious and innately political.
It would be hard to imagine a more overtly leftist premise for a crowd-pleasing action movie than the poor and desperate being hunted for sport by wealthy businessman types for whom everything is a cold transaction, including the murder of people whose only crime is being poor.
The film’s catalyst is the cold-hearted murder of Douglas Binder (Chuck Pfarrer, who also wrote the screenplay), one of those suffering souls, a veteran reduced to handing out fliers for smut, by a group of hunters led by Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) and his sociopathic second-in-command Pik Van Cleef (Arnold Vosloo).
A great action movie needs a great villain and Hard Target has a doozie in Henriksen, who plays Emil as the pitch-black soul of capitalism at its most homicidal and destructive.
The mean-faced character actor plays the film’s appropriately larger than life adversary as a man who has never cracked a smile in his life, who doesn’t believe in smiling, or happiness, or laughter, only greed and power.
The veteran’s death inspires his daughter Natasha (Yancy Butler) to come to New Orleans to look for her missing old man. The official story is that he died in a fire but Natasha suspects otherwise.
After Chance saves her from a group of attackers, Natasha hires him to act as her guide to the seedy New Orleans underworld. Chance accepts but, in keeping with the film’s intense, admirable class-consciousness, only so that he can make the 217 dollars he needs to pay his union dues.
The next target for the hunters of human is a black veteran who is lured with the promise of a tiny sum of money then stalked through the streets of New Orleans, where he unsuccessfully tries to get strangers to help save him from certain doom.
What makes this sequence haunting is the sense that even if the people purposefully ignoring the poor black man knew the reality of his dire situation they still would not help because he’s poor and old and black and those lives are not valued by society, in 1993 or 2021 or any time in between.
Emil then decides to make Chance the next target of his big group hunt for people. The hunters welcome the opportunity to face off against such a worthy opponent, fatally unaware that they are secondary bad guys in a Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle, and consequently as good as dead.
Hard Target has so much going for it that it can hold off on introducing WILFORD BRIMLEY AS CHANCE’S UNCLE BOUDREAU, A TINY, GNOME-LIKE CAJUN KILLING MACHINE WHO MAKES MOONSHINE DEEP IN THE BAYOU until an hour in.
Even if Hard Target wasn’t an emotionally satisfying, gorgeously filmed and tremendously exciting motion picture it would nevertheless be worth seeing solely for the fact that Wilford Brimley plays a tiny, gnome-like, moonshine-making and swillin’ Cajun killing machine in it.
That is casting as unexpected as it is inspired. Brimley is clearly having a goddamn blast delivering peppery dialogue like “Good whiskey make the jack rabbit slap the bear!” In a cajun accent as thick and spicy as gumbo.
In the third act the action switches to the bayou and then to a graveyard for Mardi Gras floats that gels perfectly with the film’s downbeat depiction of New Orleans. Movies set in New Orleans are generally loud and boisterous, full of revelers and tourists, a twenty-four hour party that never stops.
Hard Target instead takes place in a New Orleans that is lonely and sad, a nighttime place where lost souls vanish without a trace and the wealthy and wicked have all the power. So it makes sense that Mardi Gras is represented by a collection of ghoulish, decaying floats rather than party animals having the time of their young lives.
As with Broken Arrow and Face/Off, Woo is most assuredly up to his old tricks here. Anyone familiar with Woo’s Hong Kong output knew exactly what they were in for: copious slow-motion, doves as ubiquitous background extras, gunfights at close range and mind-meltingly awesome fight choreography and stunt-work that take full advantage of Van Damme’s extraordinary gifts as a martial artist as well as a man.
Van Damme is a deadly dancer here, a dynamo blessed with the looks of a male model, the grace of a professional gymnast and the lethal feet and fists of a world-class martial artist.
With the possible exception of Sergio Leone, no director better understands the primal power of faces and movie stardom than Woo. Van Damme has consequently never been this iconic or unforgettable.
I’m glad I found an excuse to revisit Hard Target for this column and one very appreciated patron, because it’s even better than I remembered and I remembered it being pretty damn good when it’s actually flat-out great.
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