Any excuse for a stunt...

Rating: 2/10 (9 January 2004)

Warning= Here be "Spoilers"!!!
Woo's "Hard Target", with Jean-Claude Van Damme, is his best movie to date. "Face / Off" and "Con-Air" are both "any excuse for a stunt" movies. Let's just face the awful truth: In EVERY action scene in this movie, not a single, solitary cop or Fed would have been shot, let alone killed.

John Woo works well as a director when the action has a "reality" to it. Police bullets just don't bounce off the side of a Lear jet, while the bad guy guns down cops. It just doesn't happen! And the "Let's play tag on Cage's pistol toten' butt" scene started an even more unbelievable seven minutes of film which should be known as "Let's all get shot by the bad guy, people. Nobody really look around for 'im!"
Why is it that a great movie maker, like Woo, and a good pitch for a film, (Terrorist vs. Cop in the future) will turn into this kind of movie when tens of millions of dollars are pumped into it. The DVD states, right to the point, that the Execs thought it needed more guns and more bodies, and boy did "Face/Off" deliver. Jumping to the end of this "any excuse for a stunt" movie is the "shot and run over by the speed boat" stunt. Like the L.A. Sheriff's office is going to let an automatic pistol shooting, speed boat driver run them over and kill' em all (but a few stunt men jumping) ALL without firing a shot... Every copy of this film and its cousin "Con-Air" should be burned and "Hard Target" put in it's place. "Hard Target" is ten times the Woo, with a tenth of the budget...