14. Hard Target (1993)
John Woo’s American debut, Hard Target is my favorite Van Damme vehicle despite some enormous silliness. Woo’s slow motion driven heroic violence is in fine form even if it is a bit toned down from his earlier Hong Kong work (not so toned down that it didn’t have to be cut down to keep from getting an NC-17 rating). It contains just about all of his trade marks and the action scenes are beautifully constructed and shot. Van Damme stars as Chance, a former soldier with Reinforced Recon who is hired to track down a girl’s missing father who was homeless on the streets of New Orleans. As Chance investigates he uncovers a ring of human hunting rich douche bags who pay to go after homeless former combat veterans. This leads to all manner of shenanigans including a lot of jumping and shooting two guns in slow motion, guys on motor cycles wearing all black, some doves and Van Damme punching out a snake. No shit, my man punches out a snake. There are some great performances here from Lance Hendrickson as the head of the human hunting business and Arnold Vosloo as his henchman Pik Van Cleef and some terrible performances from Wilford Brimley who does the absolute worst Cajun accent I have ever heard and Van Damme himself who is awesome at kicking and shooting shotguns but terrible delivering lines like when answering why he is named Chance he says ‘My Mamma took one.’ I don’t think I knew what he actually said the first five or so times I saw this. It doesn’t even touch Brimley’s ridiculous pronunciation of the name Chance and declaring that his moonshine was so good it would make ‘the rabbit love the bear.’ At least I think that is what he said. The only Brimley performance more embarrassing is when he starts talking to Tom Cruise about ‘personal things…ORAL things’ in the Client. But I love Hard Target all the more for its silliness because it is just that funny. Also Van Damme’s mullet is so bad the villains in the film should have been hunting his barber.
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The Professional? I effing HATED that movie SO MUCH!!!! UGH. You know when you think a movie is just so bad that it makes you angry that you watched it? That is how I feel about The Professional.
I just don’t DIG movies like that as a general rule.
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Given that you never saw the Matrix because it ‘didn’t look even remotely good’ I think it is safe to say this whole list is probably not material you would dig.
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No Ninja Assassin fail.
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GJ: As I said above: I tried to keep it to movies that didn’t stray too far into other their own sub-genre where I could, for instance I avoided primarily martial arts movies as they deserve their own list.
Ninja Assassin definitely goes on the martial arts list which currently doesn’t exist.
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martial arts list stat
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