John Woo Brought Out the Best in Jean-Claude Van Damme in This Action Movie
The Big Picture
- Jean-Claude Van Damme's career had its ups and downs, but his highlights include films like Timecop and Double Impact .
- Hard Target is notable for its visual flair and the iconic style of director John Woo.
- John Woo's unique style, which involves maximalist visuals and interpreting violence as a beautiful ballet of destruction, complements Van Damme's physical abilities and creates memorable action scenes.
If Arnold Schwarzenegger was the ideal superhero brought to life, and Sylvester Stallone was a natural fighter who constantly got back up, then Jean-Claude Van Damme was a high-wire daredevil with a ballet dancer's form. Making a name for himself with his sleek physique, incredible splitting legs, and roundhouse kicks for days, Van Damme was a welcome change of pace for the audience's perception of what an action star could be. Van Damme was relatively limited and, at times, downright gimmicky in his star persona (splits, Belgian accent, silly hair), and his career died down by consistently doing films that (besides being just bad films) didn't work with his limitations and didn't try to put him in the best position for him. If you look at the highlights of his career, including the likes of Timecop and Double Impact, it's clear that no filmmaker understood the JCVD special as John Woo did, and their one collaboration created the best film of Van Damme's career, Hard Target.
Hard Target
A woman hires a drifter as her guide through New Orleans in search of her missing father. In the process, they discover a deadly game of cat and mouse behind his disappearance.
Run Time 97 minutes Director John Woo Release Date August 20, 1993 Actors Jean-Claude Van Damme, Lance Henriksen, Yancy Butler, Wilford BrimleyWhat is 'Hard Target' About?
Chance Boudreaux (Van Damme) is a drifter of little background, who wanders his way into New Orleans, looking for work. He wants to sail off to find work, but needs money in order to get on the boat. Luckily for him, he happens to come across Nat (Yancy Butler), a young woman who needs help finding her missing father. Chance helps her if she gives him the money he needs for shipfare, and so the two team up to find her father. Their investigation will lead them to discover that there's a shady organization led by Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) and his right-hand man, Pik Van Cleaf (Arnold Vosloo), who get paid by wealthy people to let them engage in arranged huntings of homeless veterans. To be frank, this plot is nearly nonsensical, as we have no clue how this organization truly works, and it's up to Henriksen and Vosloo to fill in the huge gaps of plausibility with their phenomenal slime powers. What matters is that they're meat puppets purely set up to be targeted by the inevitable JCVD kicks of death. Until that happens, it's up to Woo to fill the runtime with his visual flair and to do what he has always done best: make masculine heroes look dope as hell.
Van Damme's appearance is clearly meant to be instantly iconic, rocking a long black trench coat over jeans and a denim jacket, with an insanely wet mullet that's been so hairsprayed to death that it's got fumes coming off of it. John Woo has always attested to the influence that Rebel Without a Cause has had on his cinematic taste, and how badly he wanted to dress and act like James Dean, and you can feel the way he's molded JCVD into that archetype. His style suggests what would happen if the Man With No Name (Clint Eastwood) had the attitude of James Dean and was an Abercrombie & Fitch model, becoming a time capsule of 1990s style in real-time. With the Louisiana soundtrack on blast, all harmonica, and Ry Cooder-style slide guitar, Boudreaux has got a humble swagger that shows that he might not mess around with fools, but he does have a well-intentioned heart. Van Damme tended to play characters who were unassuming badasses hiding in plain sight, who were never looking for fights but always finished them, in a similar vein to the roles that early-1990s Bruce Willis would take. In his interactions with Nat, he's always polite and straightforward, but with a little bit of sarcastic exasperation directed towards the incompetent law enforcement. Chance is lacking a lot of the dated machismo that many of the action stars of the time had, an indication of the influence that Woo had over the film's depiction of masculinity.
John Woo Views Masculine Violence As Beautiful
For better or worse, John Woo is a visual maximalist who can only interpret violence as a gorgeous ballet of destruction. The camera is constantly moving for the widest money shot or zooming in for a closeup close enough that you can see the sweat-drenched pores of the actors' faces. Said sweat is important to the atmosphere of Hard Target, specifically, as it sells the New Orleans environment, with the thick fog blanketing the streets and shafts of the harsh sunlight shooting through every window. Guns are fired with reckless abandon, leaving unrealistic dust and blood explosions big enough to make you wonder if TNT is in every bullet. Woo functions on an unwritten rule that the more bullets a character can fire, the better, especially if those bullets lead to explosions that Michael Bay had to have imprinted on. Woo prides himself on never being ashamed of his excess, so the film doesn't chuckle in the slightest when Van Damme uses eight bullets to kill one guy or killing someone while holding a gun upside down, which I'm not sure is even physically possible, but who cares? Plus, the more camera angles the better, so Woo can amp up the kinetic dynamism by cutting between numerous angles of the same big setpiece at once. Not only does this give Woo more editing freedom and coverage to keep the action clear, but it also helps hide the difference between when JCVD does his own stunts and when the stuntpeople take over.
For the majority of Hard Target, JCVD does his own stunts, and Woo understands that to best showcase his limber gymnastics, he needs space and proper blocking. He implements a style of editing more familiar to Asian action films: when he films one of Van Damme's kicks, he breaks up the chronological flow of the kick, where the second shot has the leg a bit farther back than it was left in the first shot. This way, it gives the audience's eyes more time to process the beautiful rainbow that is the curve of a Van Damme roundhouse kick. The extra camera angles help smooth over the cracks in the moments when JCVD doesn't do the stunt, most notably when he somersaults over a car speeding towards him and whenever he's on horseback. On the flipside, it's definitely Van Damme when he rides a motorcycle while standing up on it, which is objectively one of the most hardcore things an action star has ever done on film. While his stunt double does most of the big tumble over the car, Van Damme sticks the landing, and we wouldn't have him doing that in the first place unless he already had his physical dexterity publicly certified.
Woo Knew How To Make Van Damme Feel Like A Hero
CloseThe thing about John Woo's approach to filmmaking is that he's too sincere to mock his material, yet also pushes his extremes so far that you can't help but see a tongue firmly planted in the film's cheek. That constant game of chicken between the two polarities informs why films like Face/Off and even Hard Boiled can have so many moments of inspired comedy through the sheer absurdity of the world's logic clashing with the rationality of its characters. By most counts, the film is trying to play itself very straight: its portrayal of New Orleans feels authentic, the fight scenes have viscerally ugly sound effects for every bone crunch and crisply planted punch, and it tries to wring real pathos out of the tragedy of a nefarious crew allowing rich people to murder innocent people. Except for the parts that most cater to JCVD are the parts that go super nuts-o, like him having a sixth sense about when some local creeps are going to attack Nat or his army crawling on his back under a table while shooting a dude 12 times in the crotch, with huge blood squib holes all over the victim's body and JCVD's priceless look of adrenaline plastered on his face. While many will admit that Van Damme was never a terribly strong actor, the quality that set him apart from the likes of Schwarzenegger and Stallone was the sense of enjoyment he brought to his characters, and how they always seemed to relish the fights they engaged in, like a cat playing with its food. This quality is what made him perfect for John Woo, mirroring his director's joi de vivre for the action scenes that only he could conceptualize.
When asked about how the film came together, Woo talked about how he was initially nervous about working with Jean-Claude Van Damme. Since this was his first American Hollywood film starring one of its biggest names, not to mention his still not fully speaking English, Woo was understandably nervous, but he trusted that he was "sure of [my own] abilities and I know how to make an actor look good on screen, make him look like a hero. I thought I could do the same for Van Damme." Once the two started working together on set, Woo realized that he could make the action scenes even more spectacular because Van Damme was capable of pushing them further.
Woo's ability to make his star actors into high-flying warriors of justice, nobly barreling their way through chaotic hordes of enemies, is what made him the ideal person to make a Jean-Claude Van Damme film. Meanwhile, JCVD was the perfect star for John Woo because of the ease with which he displayed his physical prowess and the easy humor he brought to Chance Boudreaux.
Hard Target is available to rent on Amazon in the U.S.
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