Review of Hard Target (1993) by Meritcoba — 27 Feb 2016

I have, as far as I can recall, never seen a die hard movie before so this is my first one. In Die hard: With a Vengeance the suspended cop McClane(Bruce Willis) gets neighborhood shop owner Carver (Samuel Jackson) to tag along as reluctant side kick, which guarantees some witty bouts of snarky exchanges and it gets delivered as can be expected.Just like 48 hours the movie turns around the combination of these two men, reluctant uncomfortable bed fellows who are forced to cooperate because a megalomaniac psychopath, played by the aptly haughty Jeremy Irons, has them run around New York against the clock solving riddles to forestall bombs going off. Soon it is revealed that Irons is the brother of one of the earlier bad guys Willis has dropped from a building in one of the previous movies. Killing a bad guy doesn't always end the evil: it might create a new one.

There is a nice twist in the plot as it becomes apparent that there is more to it than mere vengeance. In fact you might say you get to watch two movies for the price of one as the first half is different from the second half.

Unfortunately the movie is so bend on throwing you from one action sequence into the next, without spending much time on connecting these that the plot starts to unravel and the plots holes need to be patched up with all kinds of allowances. Irons, for instance, suffers from that omnipresence and omnipotence that is so typical for these movies otherwise the story would not stick. The CIA and FBA make a short appearance, but Irons calls the men out by name and after that, having been found out apparently, we never hear from these agencies again for it is Willis who needs to save the day and nobody else. Their only purpose seems to be to inform us who the bad guy is. Bad storytelling, if you ask me.. for they could have tricked Irons into revealing himself after Willis got him worked up. For a while it looks like that was they way they were heading, but that is dropped.

At various moments the movie relies on sheer luck or coincidence to keep on going. For instance one of Irons' games with Willis and Jackson involves a bomb in a briefcase in a park that is lying there for them to be picked up, yet nobody sees or steels the briefcase while it lies there, unattended in full view of a lot of people. At another moment Willis gets ejected from an underground tunnel and drops down to the ground at the same time as Jackson, making his was via another route, drives past him so he can pick Willis up and they can continue the pursuit together. After a while it seems that the writers just gave up making sense and went with the whatever goes is okay ploy.. At some point for instance Willis stops a truck thinking it is driven by terrorists without shooting the drivers first and it turns out just to be an innocent guy, yet some time later he just shoots the drivers, and it turns out they are terrorists.

After a while you get the feeling that movie is overburdened with twists, explosions and people. For instance Irons has a female sidekick who seems totally superfluous and could have been left out as her presence doesn't add anything to the story, just like the guy who is the go between between Irons and his employers from the Middle East. Also, after the first twist in the plot there is a next one and a next one after that one, until it starts to become tedious. In addition one wonders why Jackson is still tagging along. The choice of making him a shop owner who gets to be involved by accident loses all logic when it becomes clear Irons has lost his omnipotence and omnipresence and Jackson's presence is no longer required or demanded by Irons.

The major point is that the first movie, as I read, plays in one building with one man taking on the terrorists in that building. The scene, the time and the actors are limited which makes the story self contained. In this movie the scene is the whole of New York where the one guy vs a bunch of terrorists becomes untenable as too many things could and would interfere. This is why many movies corner of the set. Isolating the scene is done to cut off people from outside help and has an additional purpose of limiting the playing field and of keeping people in. This movie fails in this and thus it needs to patch up a lot of the plot holes and that shows..

All in all not a bad film, but not a good one either.