Hard Target
John Woo and Sam Raimi together in The Big Easy, too many cooks spoil the broth.
The cold opening has a underground ring of rich people hunting humans for sport. There’s Imhotep (with his South African accent) as muscle, but the big bad is Bishop from Aliens!
The guy they are hunting is some homeless veteran, but in the next day his estranged daughter shows up in a convertible, asking around for information.
The protagonist is introduced is a truly silly scene with a lot of banjos is the soundtrack. Seriously, there are way too many banjos, this is not Deliverance. Of course Van Damme is some French-Canadian dude named Chance Boudreaux, what an absolutely stupid name.
Like Inside Llewyn Davis, he wants to sail in a merchant ship, but doesn’t have money to pay the union dues, so he needs to help the daughter to find her daddy. His body shows up in the first day, but the cops are worthless, he will investigate himself.
Of course Van Damme finds proof of murder. The next hunt will be the black guy they met, another combat vet. The autopsy doctor is on the take, that’s why they never find out anything. They do hunt him down, through a graveyard, and just murder him in broad nightlight in a bustling Latin Quarter street.
Sam Raimi just had to put Ted Raimi in this, as a idiot businessman that mistreats the hunted veteran.
After this, things start getting really silly. The detective takes them to see the pornomancer, but the bad guys got to him first, and literally blew his head off with a shotgun in his car! This lurk around and what follows is a preposterous slow motion action scene where Vam Damme almost dances in the hood of a car. There’s a lot of shit blowing up, but they manage to jump into a train to escape.
They leave near some bayou, and trek into the woods, before Van Damme punches a rattlesnake in the head and bites off its tail, leaving a snake trap, somehow. Van Damme’s uncle is distilling moonshine and talking the bare minimum of French. He gives him a horse and a shotgun, but the girl stays behind.
Just as I though the uncle would be killed and the girl kidnapped, they escape on horseback, and he manages to fire some arrows and French malapropisms. He blows up his own house but doesn’t delay them a bit.
By “escape”, I mean she forces them to meet Van Damme in the final showdown, in the Mardi Gras floats graveyard. Don’t worry, there are flying pigeons, this is still John Woo. The uncle with the bow and arrows, but the girl gets called a bitch, snaps and is also shooting up the place herself. Alas, that feminist angle is only a single gag.
The muscle dude throws a grenade into a window as Van Damme is jumping into it from the other side, then slides on the ground and shoots him. The big bad does kidnap the girl (why did she throw the gun away!), and is holding her by her ponytail. As he forces her to load his long hard gun from his crotch holster (complete with a giggle), Van Damme runs really fast and kicks him. He shoves a grenade into his pants and runs away.
Van Damme’s mullet is bigger than the hair of his love interest. I’m pretty sure Bishop’s big mansion is the same one from Interview with the Vampire. The uncle is the doctor from The Thing!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.