KWIF: Hard Target (+3)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film, where each week (or so) I have a spotlight movie, of which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I have watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts.

This Week: 
Hard Target (1993, d. John Woo - Tubi)
Timecop (1994, d. Peter Hyams  - Tubi)
Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris (2022, d. Anthony Fabian - Crave)
Cowboys and Aliens (2011, d. Jon Favreau - Tubi)

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It's been 30+ years since I saw, and was disappointed by Hard Target. There's been no urge to revisit it since, but it popped up as part of Tubi's recommendation algorithm during a particularly lazy Saturday afternoon, so... why not? I have become a real fan of the man-hunting-man-for-sport subgenre of action film [I should probably make a "most dangerous game" tag] in the past decade, so it made sense to revisit what was perhaps my first exposure to that type of story.

Being in my mid-teens when this debuted in theatres, I hadn't yet been exposed to John Woo, so his storytelling language was quite alien to me at the time, and I balked at its absurdity. I did know who Wilford Brimley was, though -- Cocoon, Ewoks: Battle for Endor and Quaker Oats commercials were all a big part of my childhood -- and the positioning of him as an action movie sidekick was downright ludicrous to me.

But with fresh eyes and much, much more cinematic experience under my belt, Woo's filmic language delights with modern, post-ironic reception. All his hallmarks are applied to this not-so-potent yet ultimately entertaining melding of "The Most Dangerous Game" and First Blood. Doves, slow-mo, fetishizing gun violence, both sides of a wall shots...that sort of thing.

There is interesting background elements to the story, both in its passing concern for veterans let down by the system, and a police department on strike leading to both a spike in criminal activity and the appropriate conditions for a manhunt-for-sport operation. it doesn't actually have much to say about either of these things...if there was commentary baked into the script, Woo's stylistic interests filtered it out of the final product.

Van Damme was still learning how to act, and his efforts at being cajun are nonexistent, but he had his screen presence locked down by this point. It's easy to forget how charming he was given how borex he seemed in his later 90's output offering diminishing returns on his schtick. Brimley seems to delight in the southern bayou accent and it's really enjoyable to see the perennial 70-year-old (regardless of how old he was, Brimley seemed to be 70 for decades) riding horseback and shooting arrows. 

Lance Henrickson just chews up the scenery having a palpable blast as the film's big nasty. He's as great a 90's b-movie villain as any, successfully going super huge, appropriately acting as if he is the king shit and utterly untouchable. Arnold Vosloo (using his actual South African accent perhaps?) is maybe not as commanding a presence as Henrickson, but he's suitably intimidating, and effectively cold-blooded as Herickson's right hand man and he does liven the film up.

What lets me down is the film's take on man-hunting-man, where Van Damme's Boudreaux never atually signs up for the manhunt and therefore doesn't actually "win" the game, which is the big thrill of the subgenre. He's more an amateur detective who stumbles upon the hunt and becomes a target as a result. It's disappointing and lacks real tension. 

There's also the matter of third-act escalation, of showing Boudreax's proficiency as a tactician and fighter. When he says to female lead, the likeable Yancy Butler, as he's leaving her in Brimley's care, "Without you, I'm hunting them", and the film implies that his familiarity with the terrain will give him some great advantage against the two dozen men now hunting him, nothing comes of it. He's still on the run, he's still somehow dodging hundreds of bullets, explosives and evading helicopter gunfire on horseback. It never successfully turns him into the hunter. Brimley feels more of the hunter and tactician.

Even still, it's never overreaching as it seems to know just what it is, and what it can be.

The Flash Scale: better than The Flash
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Double dosing on Van Damme that lazy Saturday, I actually watch Timecop first. I always had a favourable opinion of this movie but I haven't revisited it since the 90's. It was based off a Dark Horse comic book, in as much as the comic book of Timecop really was designed to serve as proof of concept to sell as a film (not the last time we'll see this).  Back in 1994, if it was tangentially related to comic books, I would watch it, and be kind of defensive about it. I had a real bias, back then (because I don't now, right? Right?). I've long been telling myself I needed to see it again, but I'm always wary about revisiting things I liked in my teenage years, both for the headslap moments of "I liked this???" and triggering those sense memories of being an utterly awkward person.

Well, no sense memories were triggered, and, I'll be damned if Timecop still isn't pretty damn fun. I mean, I'm still such a sucker for time travel shenanigans, and I liked how this story doesn't do branching timelines, it's just one linear timeline that gets all fucked up by time travellers, and there's a U.S. government agency chasing down time criminals from creating ripple effect into the future... and doing a pretty piss poor job at it.  Van Damme plays Max Walker, who stumbles upon a half-assed conspiracy by Ron Silver's presidential hopeful to steal the past in order to steal the presidency.  It's really dumb, but dumb in that delightfully formulaic 80's and 90's storytelling kind of way. 

The space-time physics and technology and whatnots are all ludicrous, but it doesn't stop the film from being a bale of fun. Van Damme is at his peak Van Damme-ness here, delivering his strongest acting performance in any film, and still in his giving-a-shit phase of his career where his ego hadn't completely taken over. Ron Silver was always the perfect go-to shitheel bad guy and he's just chomping down on every scene he's in. Mia Sara plays Van Damme's wife, and together they sell the relationship in a way that most action stars don't really wind up having sexual or romantic chemistry with their counterpart. It's astonishing to see a film like this with a steamy sex scene, mainly because we don't get those too often anymore, and one that doesn't seem male-gazey,  delivering equal time to each participant's body, and selling the idea of mutual pleasure. (It's a sex positive film. My favourite exchange in the film, after Walker and his tagalong from internal affairs Agent Sarah Fielding set back into the past: 
Walker: "Don't get sentimental and try to visit yourself."
Fielding: "Actually, I'd kind of like to call myself and tell me not to sleep with Bobby Morgan after my party. It's really disappointing."
Walker: "A smart woman would call Bobby and give him some advice.")

It's a pretty punchy script overall, and it closes its own causality loop very nicely, making for a thoroughly satisfying done-in-one film. There's no need for a franchise.

The Flash Scale: better than The Flash
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One of the latest subgenres in storytelling is kindness porn: stories about nice people who actively inspire niceness in others through their own kindness and positive spirit. In film the apex of this is the Paddington movies, in comic books it's Squirrel Girl, on TV it's Ted Lasso.  While there are people who have been completely receptive to the subgenre, the surprise successes and seeming longevity of "nice media", there are also those that bristle at it, demean it, rebuff its advances, often mistaking the pleasantness for treacle.  But kindness porn isn't treacly. It often is very aware of the darker forces in the world (and in self) but it doesn't so much reject the darkness as look for a crack for which it can pry open and let the light.  Kindness porn, I think, foremost, is about empathy and acceptance.

Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris finds a widowed cleaning woman in post-war London taking admirable care of her client's homes, and, sometimes her clients themselves. She is a kind woman with the ability to persevere in the face of adversity.  She's giving but not selfless, she's gentle but not naive, she treats others how she would like to be treated, even those who don't treat her such in kind.

When she spies one of her richer client's Christian Dior gowns, she falls in love. Her mission in life becomes to have one of her own, even if it cost five hundred pounds...a small fortune for the working class. Working hard but also with a few strokes of luck, Mrs. Harris' mini-fortune comes to fruition and she's off to Paris to engage with the snobbish world of haute cuture. But also, Paris is the city where the laborer is king, and despite her initial rejection by the house of Dior manager, she is welcomed in by many.

From there it's not entirely sweetness and roses, but it does, ever so gently, get at the heart of the matter, exploring classism both from the angle of someone wanting to partake in something the elite see as theirs, and also taking jabs at the elite and the way they dehumanize and other the working class. 

Mrs. Harris doesn't quite have the same magical charm as Paddington bear, but then, she's not a talking bear with a marmalade sandwich under her hat. As well, there's something uneasily capitalist about the film that revolves around buying a dress. On the one hand it's smacking down the elite, but also raising their status symbols aloft in the other. 

The Flash Scale: better

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speaking of unispired

Although Timecop kind of did it in the early 90's, the 2000's became the heyday of putting out comics for the explicit purpose of selling a screenplay. Comic book properties were hot stuff, and it's easier to present a studio exec something visual than a wad of words on pages.  Entire publishers formed out of being a gateway for getting from script-to-page-to-screen.  As much as Marvel's success in building a shared universe pulled the studios focus away from buying just any comics property for their next major motion picture, but I think, at about the same time, Cowboys and Aliens decimated the studios faith in comics properties as a guaranteed through-line to success.

Muckraking comics reporter Rich Johnson originally exposed the publishing shenanigans that led to a glut of Cowboys and Aliens trade paperbacks being literally given away (or dumpstered) at many comics shops as a ploy to reaching the tops of the bestsellers charts. I remember my local shop stuffing one into my bag when I wasn't looking (after declining to take one myself). I never read it -- the taint on that thing was swift -- but it still lingers in a box with other trades somewhere.

Despite the ploy being reported in comic news, it didn't matter to studio execs who bought the script and greenlit the feature, with Jon Favreau, fresh off of Iron Man 2, directing and Lost's Damon Lindleof and Carlton Cuse doing a rewrite on the script. Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford -- both known for their portrayals of icons of cinema -- were brought on as leads.  This was as sure a slam dunk as anything and yet audience reaction was unenthusiastic and critics were unimpressed. It bombed at the box office.

This was something a studio just threw money at, nobody's heart was in it, and that apathy is palpable. Everyone involved just did the work but brought nothing more to it.  The story isn't engaging or entertaining in any real way, it's a going-through-the-motions plot that doesn't provide anything particularly cool visually or conceptually to inspire the audience. Likewise, the characters are big nothings, there's so very little to invest in with them, and nobody has any sort of badass swagger.  Craig seems almost embarassed to be in the picture, and Ford is clearly cashing a paycheck. The tonal dichotomy between an alien invasion and western isn't something impossible to bridge (Nope, for example) but this story didn't crack it.  It's bad.

The Flash Scale: worse than The Flash