No, Wait: Is 'Hard Target' Actually the Ultimate August Movie?

A couple of years ago, I went in search of the perfect August movie and thought I found it in Red Eye, the Wes Craven-directed thriller starring Rachel McAdams as a passenger on an overnight flight and Cillian Murphy as the man who charms then menaces her. Then, last year, Scott offered a kind of counterpoint with a tribute to Premium Rush, the David Koepp film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a thrillseeking New York bike messenger and Michael Shannon as his relentless archnemesis that Scott dubbed “the most August movie of the century.” As August approached this year, I started thinking: Was I wrong? Were we both wrong? And do we need to look back further to find the ultimate August movie?

It’s probably best if we start by defining the term. There are seasons within the summer movie season. The end of May through mid-July brings the release of big, brand-name films. This year that meant a new Mission: Impossible, a new Karate Kid movie (remember?), a How to Train Your Dragon remake, a Pixar, a new Superman, a new Fantastic Four, a new I Know What You Did Last Summer, and F1, which merged the Formula One and Brad Pitt brands. Sure, there were some curveballs here and there, like Bring Her Back, Eddington, and The Phoenician Scheme (though Wes Anderson movies do now seem to show up regularly as summer alternatives). But now we’ve arrived in August. And in August, almost anything goes.

Though this year’s is a little tamer than most, August is traditionally the land of high-concept comedies (The 40-Year-Old Virgin debuted in August), unclassifiable horror movies (this year’s Weapons appears to check that box), misfit genre fair, and other sorts of movies for those who don’t need recognizable franchise names to get them into theaters. If there’s a quintessential August movie, it’s Sam Raimi’s Darkman, an off-brand blockbuster that looked intriguing enough to draw in big crowds in the waning days of the summer of 1990 and delivered the goods for those who turned out. 

But is Darkman the ultimate August movie? Maybe. Or maybe it just embodies all the qualities to which an August movie should aspire. It underpromises (“Who is Darkman?,” its first wave of posters asked while offering few clues) then overdelivers (“Wow, OK, so that’s who Darkman is! Neat!”). Similarly, little about Hard Target seemed to set it apart from other films starring Jean-Claude Van Damme,* the Belgian martial artist-turned-actor whose star had been slowly rising as the late-’80s turned into the early 1990s. Sure, the budgets and profiles of Van Damme’s films had both risen as he moved from Cannon productions like Cyborg to studio fare like Universal Soldier. But in August of 1993, neither the title nor the tagline (“Don’t hunt what you can’t kill.”) nor the poster (the name “Van Damme” above a close-up of Van Damme’s face reflected in an arrowhead) suggested Hard Target would be anything other than another Van Damme actioner. Unless, that is, you looked at the fine print, which revealed it as “A John Woo Film.”