John
Woo, the world's greatest action director, at last brings his three-ring,
20-gun, hellzapoppin' Hong Kong movie circus to America, and the results,
in "Hard Target," are unlike anything you've ever seen.
It
may be good, it may be bad, depending; but it is certainly new.
Woo
made his reputation in a number of loony Chinese bulletfests, which is
a feat in itself: He managed to distinguish himself globally against the
context of the world's most absurd, raucous and trashy film culture. But
his true masterwork is "The Killer," one of the world's great outlaw-screwball
masterpieces, a twisted extravaganza of overwrought balletic ultra violence
and weepy buddy sentimentality. He wouldn't exist without Sam Peckinpah,
but he makes Sam Peckinpah look like . . . Woody Allen (who's also filming
gunfights now, but that's a different story!)
"Hard
Target" isn't true blue Woo; one can see where he's reined himself in thematically
to work within the American studio system with its reliance on star-driven
vehicles. The star doing the driving in this particular case is the least
interesting aspect of the film, and the second least interesting aspect
is the story. About them collectively, Woo could care less.
Jean-Claude
Van Damme. Sigh. Groan. Yawn. ZZZZZZZ. Jean-Claude Van Damme?
Well,
as Chuck Pfarrer's meager story has it, Jean-Claude is one Chance Boudreaux
(is that a name or what?), a down-and-out ex-'Nam war hound (Marine recon,
the best of the best) drifting along on the skid rows of New Orleans. He's
one of those homeless guys you always see hanging out, you know, the ones
in the Armani raincoats, with the flawlessly white teeth and the $200 haircuts
slick with mousse. I always give those guys a dime. Anyway, after rescuing
a beautiful young woman from thugs (a great martial arts scene), he is
hired by her to locate her missing father, also a Marine war hero, also
tragically homeless.
This
quickly inserts us into the rest of the story, a gloss on the old pulp-classic
short story, "The Most Dangerous Game." It seems that a debauched criminal
superman (Lance Henriksen) is offering discreet human safaris, in which
jaded big game hunters cough up big dough for the ultimate forbidden thrill:
a chance to hunt human game across urban nightscapes. It's paint ball with
5.56-millimeter full metal jackets.
All
this is lame pretext. It's clear that the setup bores Woo, because he invests
no energy in personifying the hunters and the relationship between Chance
and the girl (Yancy Butler, a spacey, Lauren Hutton type) remains flat
and dreary. Far more intimacy -- in fact, it's a relationship charged with
homoeroticism -- develops between Henriksen and his No. 1 guy, a creepy
psycho called Pik played creepily by Arnold Vosloo. Woo just wants to get
the shooting started.
Soon
enough, Van Damme has got himself declared an endangered species and is
being hunted not only by the hunters but by Henriksen's entire para-military
apparatus, which includes helicopters and every weapon known to man except
the Pez dispenser.
Woo
is willing, at this point, to make concessions to formula, and thus stops
the action at one point to accommodate a strictly by-the-numbers comic
interlude with platitudinous old Wilford Brimley, spouting bromides and
oatmeal as Chance's inevitable "Crazy Cajun Uncle." This gives the over-exposed
Brimley a few minutes of down-homey showboating and simply stalls the final
gun-down.
But
what a gun-down. And what a series of gun-ups to get to the gun-down. Viewed
as kinetic sculpture, its elaborate action sequences totally divorced from
the brainless story that so limply supports it, "Hard Target" is off the
charts, off the walls and through the roof. Then it knocks the house down.
Have I made myself clear?
Woo
views action differently than his American progenitors. He is to action
as Jim Abrahams and Jerry and David Zucker were to the parody: he expands
the form exponentially, literally creating a tapestry of hypnotic intensity
that just keeps topping itself. The tired old staples of the gunfight and
all its subthemes -- ambush, facedown, one-on-20 -- are now seen as through
a glass freshly. He takes the balletics of classical martial arts and adds
guns, lots of guns, guns used as they have never been used before in movies,
and literally creates action poetry. Call it Gun Fu. But he refuses to
yield entirely to romance: Like Peckinpah he uses the technical device
of the blood-pack, the little spurt of plasma that springs from a just
punctured body. Thus be forewarned: "Hard Target" is a blood-pack-o-rama,
and at one point it was so gory it got an NC-17 rating. Now it's only a
hard, hard R.
One
pines to see Woo back in the saddle again as he was in Hong Kong, writing
his own films which express his view of the world, and working with the
best actors and the biggest budgets. Perhaps "Hard Target" will be hit
enough to get him to that happy hunting ground, perhaps not. But in a single
step, he makes most other American action movies feel tepid and slow.
