Double the Van Dammage: Hard Target (1993) and Street Fighter (1994)

Unfortunately, these are the last two films in my Van Damme quadruple feature DVD set. But don't worry, I bought another one, this time with even weirder straight-to-video stuff. It should make for some enjoyable Van Dammage in the future. Stay tuned.

Hard Target (1993)

This one's probably most famous for being really weird. Van Damme, sporting a mullet worthy of the Hall of Fame, plays Chance, a Cajun with a shifty past and some mad kung fu skills. He's hired some lady looking for her missing father. They quickly find out, however, that he was killed by a rich butthole who hunts homeless Vietnam vets for sport. Naturally, there's revenge to be had. Hard Target is an exercise in absurdity: each scene is exponentially weirder than the last, with the chase sequence in the Bayou being by far the weirdest. Even for a Van Damme film, this one is a bit out there. In terms of the martial arts, there's not much here. There's a few decent fights, but they're almost all filmed in super slo-mo. In a way, they're perfect for a poser like Van Damme, but the choreography is substandard, particularly in comparison with Van Damme's contemporaries in the genre. But as an action film more generally, Hard Target is beautifully unselfconscious. There's not a single halfhearted idea or concept thrown out there; rather, each stupid idea is followed to its "logical" conclusion. As long as you don't go in expecting a martial arts tournament, Hard Target is one of the better Van Damme films.

Street Fighter (1994)

And this one's probably most famous for being really awful. Truly, who knows what in the world is going on in this film. Our friend Van Damme is Guile, a military man tasked with finding the nefarious M. Bison, who has kidnapped some innocent folks and is holding them up for ransom. Bison has also turned one of Guile's pals into a green mutant because he hates him so much. Consequently, Guile gathers up some allies to launch an attack on Bison's hideout. It all leads up to one of the most nonsensical set-piece finales in any film. Street Fighter is poorly acted, poorly scripted, poorly shot, poorly edited, and poorly lots of other things, but really, the fundamental problem with the film is that there's actually very little fighting in it. There's plenty of action movies with more idiotic plots than this one (certainly with worse acting), but for a movie based on a fighting game, I need more than two or three combat sequences because the sub-slapstick comedy in this one was not working for me. This film makes the Mortal Kombat adaptation look Citizen Kane, if only because the brain trust behind Mortal Kombat had the common sense to make a fairly straightforward martial arts film. Street Fighter is somewhere between a made-for-TV children's special and a rather meandering adventure film. And in that sense, it's unsatisfying on nearly every level. The few scenes of one-on-one combat are ruined by a style of editing that most closely resembles epilepsy. And even for fans of Van Damme, there's little to like about the big lug's role: a few spin-kicks are thrown in there, sure, but not much else, not even the splits. Street Fighter doesn't even reach the ridiculous "highs" that something like Double Team stumbles fortuitously upon. I can only recommend Street Fighter for serious Van Damme devotees.