Hard Target

It's almost impossible to take Jean-Claude Van Damme seriously. After all, he combines the bland screen persona of Chuck Norris with the thickly accented blankness of Christopher Lambert. And in Hard Target, he sports Steven Seagal's hairdo. But he also possesses the vaulting ambitions of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Jean-Claude is anxious to Van Damme his way to the top of the action heap. Hard Target is just crazy enough to place him closer to that goal.

Violence — and lots of it — is the point of Hard Target. Until a few last-minute cuts were made, the movie was threatened with an NC-17 rating. Even with the snips, Hard Target scores well on the Joe Bob Briggs' meter. It uses enough hi-tech firepower to be a visual trade show for the National Rifle Association.

The truly weird thing about this pyrotechnic debacle, however, is that it's supposed to be making a social statement about the plight of the homeless. (I can't wait to see Jean-Claude tackle health-care reform.)

Hard Target is set in New Orleans. Perennial movie villain Lance Henriksen is operating a unique service for chubby millionaires who want the thrill of hunting human prey. Homeless vets are recruited as targets in exchange for $10,000 — if they survive the chase. Since the rules of the hunt are totally stacked against them, Henriksen doesn't have to worry about overhead.

All goes well until our villian runs afoul of the Gene Kelly of high-flying kicks. The bad guy has about 6,000 thugs working for him. Van Damme has his uncle, who's played by Wilford Brimley. Guess who mops up the place?

Despite its extreme stupidity, Hard Target is Van Damme's best film. The whole movie crackles with the energy of an MTV production gone mad. It's the American debut of Hong Kong action director John Woo, who choreographs violence as if he were Busby Berkeley on steroids. Woo has garnered a sizable cult following in the States, even though American access to his chop suey epics such as A Better Tomorrow II is limited.

Hard Target almost works, in spite of its sheer ludicrousness. Granted, it's unremittingly bloody, suggestively homophobic and politically insincere. But by Van Damme's standards, it's almost Gone With the Wind.

Besides, it's a comedy — isn't it?

Terminal Velocity

There used to be an old SCTV skit called “The Farm Film Bureau Report.” In it, two guys wearing bib overalls rated movies by how well everything blew up. Terminal Velocity is their kind of flick, since its only redeeming virtue is that a few things “blow up good.” You even get to see a car fall five miles and splatter across half of the Southwest.

Unfortunately, the movie's two negligible stars are not in the vehicle. It's a shame – some people would pay full admission to see Charlie Sheen and Nastassja Kinski crash something more than just their careers.

Of course, with a cast headed by this dubious duo, Terminal Velocity instantly earns a footnote in the annals of “Le Bad Cinema.” Its goofy plot line doesn't help: it's an incoherent story about good ex-KGB agents battling it out against bad ex-KGB thugs with ol' Charlie as a red-blooded American skydiver/stripper (I'm not making this up) who gets involved because he wants to jump Kinski's bones. Obviously, the end of the Cold War has put a real strain on the “patriotic ideal” bit.

Some of the movie's stunt work is spectacular, but the film's sluggish pace causes attention spans to drop as fast as a brick. It doesn't help that Sheen's method of fleshing out his character is to play dumber as the plot drags on. (He may set a record for the amount of penis jokes used in a motion picture, however). Sometimes, you have to wonder if Martin Sheen ever considered changing his stage name.

Demolition Man:

Film Theorists, please note: Sylvestor Stallone has become a deconstructionist. Of course, Sly probably thinks that the word “deconstruction” refers to de crew at de work site around de corner. Actually, that’s not such a bad definition. It fits his newest film like a fist in a chain-mail glove.

Demolition Man is wildly violent, irredeemably awful and occasionally crazy enough to be almost watchable – especially if you are half warped and laugh at Jeffery Dahmer jokes. It’s also the oddest movie ever to be partly based on the novel Brave New World. I am not kidding. One of the main characters is even named Lenina Huxley. You just know that one of the writers of this sucker is an English Lit. major gone bad.

The flick opens as a parody of Blade Runner. It’s 1996, and the Hollywood sign is in flames above a riot-torn Los Angeles. Stallone is Sgt. John Spartan of the LAPD, the kind of cop who blows up whole sections of the city just to catch one man. Which he does while arresting Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes with blond hair). Phoenix is the self-proclaimed king of South Central L.A. and a full-time homicidal maniac. This combo insures a double-digit body count before the opening credits.

Spartan catches his man, but allows 30-some hostages to get wasted. As a result, both he and Phoenix are sentenced to serve some time frozen in a cryogenic prison. Fast skip to 2032, where a defrosted Phoenix stages a bloody escape. The 21st century cops of the San Angeles Police Force have no experience with dangerous criminals, so guess who they pop loose from the fridge?

It’s at this point Demolition Man tries to be a satire. We learn that after the great quake – and the administration of President Schwarzenegger – Los Angeles merged with Santa Monica. To prevent further war and violence, the entire society was reconditioned by its patron savior, Raymond Cocteau, who created a politically correct haven that outlawed all forms of bad language, physical contact and aggressive behavior. It’s a perfect new order that’s vaguely threatened by a pesky pack of subterranean civil libertarians. In other words, the whole place is ripe for a head-bashing fest.

This is not the dumbest flick that Stallone ever starred in. But, it’s close, real close. (Actually, someone like Roger Corman could have milked it into a great drive-in piece – it’s incoherent enough to be post-modernist, and its ironies are piled high.)

Too bad Demolition Man isn’t worse – it’s almost bad enough to be good.

I Love Trouble

Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts aren't exactly the pair you think of for a
romantic-comedy-thriller that wants to be a mix of The Front Page, The Thin Man and Die Hard. (For that matter, those films aren't what you'd think of in terms of a mix.) The whole concept of I Love Trouble, Nolte and Roberts' new film, is pure gibber­ish, and it takes a rollercoaster ride through every cliche imaginable.

Amazingly, it still comes up a win­ner.

Admittedly, the makers of I Love Trouble seem to be convinced that all hard-hitting newspaper reporters wear expensive designer clothes as they poke around disaster sites and grill witnesses. (In truth, nobody wears high heels to major train derailments anymore. Local reporters wear them only to murder scenes.)

I Love Trouble moves at a surreal, lighting-fast pace that wears almost as well as the expensive trench coats sport­ed by Nolte. (If this review is starting to sound as if it's about wardrobes, that will give you some idea of how fashion-starved some newspaper people really are.)

Nolte plays Peter Brackett, an inves­tigative reporter-turned-columnist for the Chicago Chronicle (read: Tribune). He's so busy promoting his first novel that he doesn't have time to do his work, and is caught trying to recycle an old piece from '85. His brash laziness so impresses his editor, that he sticks Nolte with covering a train wreck. The assignment is cut-and-dried, until Nolte discovers that there's a new scribbler in town who's capable of out-scooping him.

That's Julia Roberts, the hot new talent working for the rival Chica­go Globe (read: Sun-Times). The two quickly find that they have aggres­sive instincts and a total loathing for each other in common. Nolte is a suave, but chauvinistic, newsman who would lie to a woman before he would his bookie. Roberts plays an abrasive macho femme who's accustomed to matching the boys shot for shot. (She also has an uncanny ability to uncover clues in the bottom of bird cages. Nolte's style is more traditional — he rifles through the trash.)

The train wreck story that brought them together turns into a crazed race between the two of them, as they each build a case of drunken negligence by a railroad employee. But the Exxon Valdez takes a sudden turn toward Watergate as it becomes obvious that something more is going on. (After all, stewed railroad workers don't normally hire South American hitmen to take shots at you.)

The plot in I Love Trouble is a decent one, but what really works are the performances by Nolte and Roberts. On paper, their pairing sounds like a bad plate of raw beef and runny ice cream, but the fact that they click so well is a tribute to the routinely underestimated talents of Nolte and the developing skills of Roberts. It's as if they've met onscreen at the exact right moment in each of their careers.

Nolte has traded in his bleary-eyed look for a sleeker self, and displays a sense of comedic timing that his previ­ous roles rarely hinted at. Likewise, Roberts shows a hard-edged spark that successfully breaks from her soft and vulnerable screen past. They're not exactly Tracy and Hepburn, but they're not bad, either.

Though I Love Trouble has a weak habit of parading its thugs as if it were a B flick, it also has the good grace to give the audience a good time by pro­viding some genuine thrills and two engaging characters.

As for the designer clothes, well, we all wear them at this paper.

Speed

Is the typical Schwarzenegger movie too complex for ya? Do you like your screenplays to resemble a news report from the Indy 500? Do you suspect that Keanu Reeves could be the new Brando, if he ever learned to act? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then this movie is just your Speed.

Hi-octane action is the main ingredient of this mindless thriller that delivers the mindless goods and threatens to be the sur­prise, mindless hit of the summer. Speed has so much action that it doesn't have any room for a plot. It hardly has any room for the actors. Heck, its makers were barely able to squeeze in all of the vehicles they smash up. What do you want, dialogue?

Reeves (in a wooden performance) plays an LAPD cop who likes grunge fashions and unusual solutions to crisis situations. Shooting all of the hostages is one of his bright ideas. Shooting his own partner (Jeff Daniels) is another good one. Given the LAPD's track record, he could eventually make chief of police.

Dennis Hopper (in a lazy performance) plays a brilliant, but deranged, bomb expert who's out to blackmail the city. That's why he has wired a crosstown bus to explode if its speed drops below 50 m.p.h. Actually, his plan makes no sense, since we're talking about Los Angeles, where nobody uses public transportation. But Hopper really needs the money — given the amount of equipment he's using, he owes Radio Shack some big bucks.

But Speed isn't about actors. It's about large-scale, metal-wrenching mayhem, as we demolish assorted elevators, buses, cars, airplanes, subway trains and several bystanders. Speed is about fabulously filmed carnage (first-time director Jan DeBont is a noted cinematographer), ludicrous stunts and existential sarcasm.

Speed has no illusions about itself, as it throttles the audience with it's charged craziness. It may even be the definitive junk movie of the summer.

Just be sure to leave your brain in the lobby.