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
  i
  Double Impact
  .
• hard target
  stands out for its visual style and the iconic style of director John Woo.
• John Woo's unique style, which includes maximalist visuals and interprets the violence as a beautiful ballet of destruction, complements Van Damme's physical skills and creates memorable action scenes.

Yes Arnold Schwarzenegger he was the ideal superhero brought to life, and Sylvester Stallone He was a natural fighter who constantly stood up, then Jean-Claude Van Damme he was a daredevil with the form of a ballet dancer. Van Damme, making a name for himself with his sleek physique, incredible split legs and roundhouse kicks for days, was a welcome change of pace for the audience's perception of what an action star could be. .. Van Damme was relatively limited and sometimes downright deceptive in his star persona (parts, Belgian accent, silly hair), and his career was extinguished by constantly making movies that (besides just being bad movies ) did not work with their limitations. and did not try to put him in the best position for himself. If we look at the highlights of his career, including Timecop i Double Impact, it's clear that no filmmaker understood the JCVD ​​special like John Woo didand their one and only collaboration created the best film of Van Damme's career, hard target.

What is “Hard Target”?

Chance Boudreaux (Van Damme) is a vagabond with little background, who wanders into New Orleans in search of work. He wants to sail for work, but he needs money to get on the ship. Luckily for him, he runs into Nat (Yancy Butler), a young woman who needs help to find her missing father. Chance helps him by giving him the money he needs for shipping, and so the two team up to find their father. Their investigation will lead them to discover that there is a shadowy organization led by Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) and his right-hand man, Pik Van Cleaf (Arnold Vosloo), which charge wealthy individuals to allow them to participate in concerted hunts for homeless veterans. Frankly, this plot is almost meaningless, as we have no idea how this organization actually works, and it's up to Henriksen and Vosloo to fill in the huge plausibility gaps with their phenomenal file powers. What matters is that they are meat puppets designed exclusively to be targeted by JCVD's inevitable death blows. Until that happens, it's up to Woo to fill the runtime with his visual style and do what he's always done best: make male heroes look like hell.

Van Damme's look is clearly destined to be instantly iconic, sporting a long black trench coat over jeans and a denim jacket, with an incredibly wet mullet that's been so slicked to death that it's n give off fumes. John Woo has always attested to the influence of this Rebel without a cause he has had his cinematic taste and how badly he wanted to dress and act like James Dean, and you can feel how JCVD ​​has molded this archetype. His style suggests what if the man with no name (Clint Eastwood) had the attitude of James Dean and was an Abercrombie & Fitch model, becoming a real time '90s style time capsule. With the Louisiana soundtrack at full blast, all harmonic and Ry Cooder-style slide guitar, Boudreaux has a humble swagger that shows he may not fool around with fools, but he has a well-intentioned heart.. Van Damme usually played characters who hid in plain sight, never looking for fights but always ending them, in a similar vein to the roles of the early 1990s. Bruce Willis would take In his interactions with Nat, he is always polite and straightforward, but with some sarcastic exasperation directed at incompetent law enforcement. Random is sorely lacking in the old-fashioned masculinity of many of the action stars of the era, an indication of the influence Woo had on the film's portrayal of masculinity.

John Woo sees male violence as beautiful

For better or worse, John Woo is a visual maximalist who can only interpret violence as a magnificent ballet of destruction. The camera constantly pans for the widest money shot or zooms in for a close-up close enough to see the sweaty pores on the actors' faces. This sweat is important to the atmosphere of hard target, specifically, as it sells the setting of New Orleans, with thick fog covering the streets and shafts of harsh sunlight shooting through every window. Guns fire with reckless abandon, leaving unrealistic explosions of dust and blood large enough to make you wonder if TNT is in every bullet. Woo operates on an unwritten rule that the more bullets a character can fire, the betterespecially if those bullets lead to explosions that Michael Bay it had to be printed on it. Woo prides himself on never being ashamed of his excess, so the film doesn't get a single laugh when Van Damme uses eight bullets to kill a man or kill someone while holding a gun upside down, which I'm not sure it's even physically. possible, but who cares? Also, the more camera angles the better, so Woo can increase the kinetic dynamism by cutting between numerous angles of the same large piece at once. This not only gives Woo more freedom of editing and coverage to keep the action clear, but also helps to hide the difference between when JCVD ​​does his own stunts and when the stunts take over.

For most of hard targetJCVD does his own stunts, and Woo understands that to best showcase his flexible gymnastics, he needs proper space and blocking. It implements an editing style more familiar to Asian action films: When filming one of Van Damme's kicks, he breaks the chronological flow of the kick, where the second shot has his leg slightly further back than it was in the first shot. That way, it gives the audience's eyes more time to process the beautiful rainbow that is the curve of a Van Damme roundhouse kick. Additional camera angles help soften the cracks in the moments when JCVD ​​isn't doing the stunt, especially when he somersaults over an oncoming car and whenever he rides a horse. Then again, it's definitely Van Damme when he rides a motorcycle while standing on it, which is objectively one of the toughest things an action star has ever done on film. While his stunt double does most of the big drop on the car, Van Damme sticks the landing, and we wouldn't want him to do it in the first place unless he already had his physical prowess publicly certified.

Woo knew how to make Van Damme feel like a hero

The thing about John Woo's approach to filmmaking is that it's too sincere to make fun of its material, but it also takes its extremes so far that you can't help but see the film's tongue firmly planted in its cheek. . This constant game of chicken between the two polarities informs why the films like them Face/Off even Hard Boiled can have so many moments of comedy inspired through the pure absurdity of the logic of the world that collides with the rationality of its characters. For the most part, the film is trying to be very straightforward: its depiction of New Orleans feels authentic, the fight scenes have viscerally ugly sound effects for every crunching bone and crunching punch, and it tries to pull the true pathos of tragedy. of a nefarious crew that allows the rich to murder innocent people. Except for the pieces that cater most to JCVD, they're the ones that get really crazy, like him having a sixth sense about when some local thugs are going to attack Nat or his army crawling on their backs under a table while he shoots a guy 12 times in the crotch, huge blood holes all over victim's body and JCVD ​​​​is priceless. a look of adrenaline plastered on his face. While many will admit that Van Damme was never a very 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 enjoy the fights they were involved in, like a cat playing with its food. This quality is what made him perfect for John Woo, reflecting his director's zest for life for action scenes that only he could conceptualize.

When asked about how the film was created, Woo talked about how initially he was nervous about working with Jean-Claude Van Damme. As this was his first American Hollywood film starring one of its biggest names, not to mention his not yet speaking English, Woo was understandably nervous, but confident that he was “sure of [my own] skills 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 he could make the action scenes even more spectacular because Van Damme was able to push them further.

Woo's ability to turn his star actors into high-flying warriors of justice, nobly fighting their way through chaotic hordes of enemies, is what made him the ideal person to make a Jean film – Claude Van Damme. Meanwhile, JCVD ​​was the perfect co-star for John Woo because of the ease with which he displayed his physical prowess and the easy humor he brought to Chance Boudreaux.

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