Welcome to Oliver Harper’s Retrospectives & Reviews. Like us all at FTN, Oliver LOVES cinema, and like us he has passions that not everyone shares, but he feels obligated to put the word out. This week Oliver looks at Hard Target – we’ll let him tell you the aims of these videos himself. Over to you, Oliver…
Every week FTN will be hosting videos looking back at classic films from the 80s and early 90s…
The videos will be a retrospective look back at a particular film covering all sides of the production and discussing how the film turned out. Many people on the net generally like to discuss films with a negative attitude and take joy in bashing films for comedic effect which does work but often many of the reviews aren’t researched well or films are taken out of context for the purpose of making a joke and I feel websites such as youtube have become over-saturated with these types of videos, I wanted to do something different.
“Often you come across films with no extras available on the DVD and you want to know more about it, so with some of the upcoming videos I will be discussing films that don’t get the respect they deserve or the ones that aren’t as bad as people think…
Hard Target (1993)
The Killer and Hard Boiled were huge hits with action movie fans, and film studios were desperate to bring John Woo over to Hollywood. John wanted a change of working conditions and felt Hollywood would be less stressful. His first offer came from Universal Studios and he took it and settled on Hard Target, a script inspired by the book The Most Dangerous Game.
Universal wanted Jean Claude Van Damme in the lead role, despite Woo wanting Kurt Russell. Once the movie was finished the American rating system, the MPAA, weren’t happy with the movie’s over the top violence and made Woo trim down the action scenes unlike Europe and Asia where the action remained intact. Hard Target is fondly remember for its traditional John Woo set pieces and his love of the slo mo button.
The video review contains a discussion on the production,director’s cut and soundtrack all summed up with my usual fair and balanced critical review.
Enjoy!
Oliver’s review
Original trailer
Irwin Fletcher
I'm an LA journalist who really lives for his profession. I have also published work as Jane Doe in various mags and newspapers across the globe. I normally write articles that can cause trouble but now I write for FTN because Nerds are never angry, so I feel safe.
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