Perhaps a surprising post from me, but one that felt necessary nonetheless.
Some of you may have noticed, but for me it’s definitely been an odd year in terms of the films I have been enjoying and what I have been looking for within cinema. From what little I know of my reputation, I am aware that I am known for my tastes frequently changing in art and my focus on films this year certainly adds to that a great deal. I started the year off in an odd stage of not-quite-burnout, still watching films but only being lazy with my selections and swallowing up Netflix comedy after Netflix comedy like the junk food that it is. My cinematic dopamine receptors were in tatters, I was watching average film after average film to the point that when I saw something that could just be classified as decent, it felt like a huge improvement, like a small helping of spice in the midst of a diet of rice.
Among the last few of these films was the John Woo and Van Damme collaboration, Hard Target. Woo’s typical bombastic style won me over completely, right there and then, reminding me of the other works of his that I had seen (his most famous films primarily: I loved Face/Off and Hard Boiledespecially) and yet my main focus throughout was the incredible on screen charisma of the star, Van Damme. Though the film is absolutely ridiculous, Van Damme fits in to the world that Woo has created perfectly. For Woo’s first American film, it laid the foundations of the second half of his career which led to some of his best (okay, and worst! I admit it) work.
- However, maintaining focus on Van Damme, after seeing Hard Target I remembered that I had been impressed by Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning which I had seen a few years ago and could only remember very small parts of. Thankfully, it was pretty easy to find, and I managed to track down copies of the three films that preceded it with some time and patience too. The first of the series, simply titled Universal Soldier, was especially surprising. Roland Emmerich is not exactly my definition of a great director — for me, he is all of the worst traits of Michael Bay and none of the more exciting or interesting ones boiled down, but the first Universal Soldier is genuinely pretty fantastic, even if it so clearly takes most of its inspiration from the…
