In HARD TARGET (1993), Jean-Claude Van Damme stars as Chance Boudreaux, an out-of-work sailor with a greasy, disgusting mullet. How he keeps it that wet we never find out. It’s definitely not from being “out to sea”. But what we do find out is this: his first name is Chance because “his mama took a chance.” Also, Wilford Brimley is his unintelligible moonshine-guzzling Cajun uncle. The movie starts out with a rough-looking dude being hunted through the streets of New Orleans. A gravelly-voiced sportsman named Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) has been hiring guys out of the local homeless population as moving targets for wealthy men of refined taste. It turns out the bum has a daughter, who eventually comes looking for him. She traces him to the seedier parts of town where she meets Chance Boudreaux, and enlists the sweaty, gross-looking Muscles From Brussels to help her out. The elegant connoisseur of the hunt Emil quickly finds out he’s met his match in the field, and makes the hunter the hunted, and then he becomes the hunted by the hunted he failed to hunt. Then he is eaten by a hell beast.
Be sure to be on the look out for JCVD chewing the rattler off a rattle snake, and a great action sequence that epitomizes the “Blown Away From Explosion” bingo square. Another curious thing to watch for are all the exploding bullets. No matter what gets shot, it explodes… traffic cones, lights on police cars, trees, grass… Wilford Brimley. Directed by John Woo.