Run For Your Life: Hard Target 18

From the archive

This film was last shown on 15 December 2024

Directed by the legendary John Woo, Hard Target is an undisputed action classic starring one of the genre’s greatest superstars in Jean-Claude Van Damme – who plays a downtrodden man forced to fight back when he unwittingly becomes the quarry in a hunt across the concrete jungle.

Veteran and drifter Chance Boudreaux (Van Damme) is out of work until he is hired by Natasha Binder (Yancy Butler) to find her missing father, a former marine. Their search leads them to uncover a sinister group of ruthless, wealthy men who hunt the homeless for sport – offering them $10,000 if they can survive the game. When Chance discovers that Natasha’s father was one of their victims, he decides to turn the tables on the hunters.

Along with Surviving the Game, Death Ring and Dominion, Hard Target is just one of several riffs on The Most Dangerous Game released in the 1990s, all of them scathingly countercultural – but Hard Target is by far the most thrilling, action-packed and political of them all.

This screening will be introduced by strand curator Craig Ian Mann.

Presented as part of the UK-wide BFI Art of Action season and curated by film historian and writer Craig Ian Mann, Run for Your Life explores action narratives in which human beings are hunted for sport. Each screening in this strand highlights the rich social, cultural and political commentary that can be found in action cinema – and particularly in films about innocent people forced to literally run for their lives.