4 out of 5

Directed by: Roel Reiné

You can be honest with me: Am I a fool for thinking this movie is actually pretty damn fine?  I mean, art it ain’t, but in terms of deliver-the-goods action chops, like, hells yeah?  Wait, before you answer, I should clarify that your opinion carries no weight in this conversation.  AND HARD TARGET 2 IS A DAMN FINE FILM.

The original Hard Target, a Van Damme / John Woo affair, was yet another take on the “most dangerous game” let’s-hunt-man-for-fun setup, and HT2 by no means seeks to diverge from that premise.  (It is, indeed, the only thing that connects it to Hard Target  1.)  In this case, our man a-hunted is Scotty Adkins, having gone the kickbox-for-dollars route with his life after his professional MMA career is derailed when he kicks a dude to death in the ring.  Also on his career plan: spending his dollars exclusively on drink (food?  pfft) because said kicked-to-death dude was his best friend.  Arrgh!

Soon enough, a shady fight promoter offers Scott a lot of money for an exclusive fight, and Scott, with his eye on a beach house he and friendo had planned on spending their MMA winnings on, agrees.  Alas, t’aint no fight, but a hunt.  A hunt for a target… which turns out to be a hard one.  Named Scott.

And everything proceeds as expected for this type of flick.  …Or does it?  Uh, yeah, it absolutely, totally does.  Adkins redeems himself, many dudes are high kicked, bad guys turn against one another, there’s an ultimate boss battle, and even a Woo dove tribute shot.  But what absolutely sells this are a few key Adkins traits:

Scott’s commitment and sincerity.  Adkins seems to have the absolutely perfect mindset for this stuff: trained to perfection but still happy to act his way through these things; lines are delivered truthfully, and not with winkiness or resignation, regardless of the budget or scale.  Similarly, he always seems to sweat every punch and kick, with each film delivering at least one or two badass moments.

The over indulgences that Scott seems to avoid.  This might not always be true given I’ve only seen a small handful of the dude’s films, but his flicks have a tendency, thus far, to stay on course.  All of the subplots are predictable, but work to keep us on the narrative straight and narrow, and the completely extraneous stuff you normally find in this genre – e.g. sex scenes – are absent.  This means that you can exist with a barebones script because you’re not wasting my time as a viewer.  To this point, there wasn’t a minute of Hard Target 2 during which I looked away or checked the clock.

The work quality Scott directly or indirectly surrounds himself with.  Director Roel Reiné manages a lot of impressively scaled shots with what certainly wasn’t a big block buster budget, and with Scott in the majority of the shots, you don’t have to edit around your actor, so the action benefits: clear spacing, cool slo-mo and background / foreground layering.  Again: it ain’t art: we’re in this for kung fu kicks, but everyone seems to be on the same page as far as delivering the best version of that possible with an in-name-only sequel.

I will laugh it up with you regarding all the things in  HT2 that make no sense.  And at a surface level, any given DTV action flick follows the same moves and mold as this one.  But you gotta acclimate to your genre, and learn to appreciate fine wine over the slop.  This is the former, my friends.