HARD TARGET (Directed by John Woo. Starring Jean Claude Van Damme, Lance Henriksen, Yancy Butler, Arnold Vosloo, Kasi Lemmons, Wilford Brimley)

The trouble with reviewing Jean Claude Van Damme movies is that he is such an easy target. The small but perfectly formed former kickboxing champion smoulders in stills and moves well in long shot but he has no discernible thespian skills. Any actor for whom the height of ambition would be a comparison to Arnold Schwarzenneger is obviously setting his sights low (probably a necessity in the case of the diminutive JCVD) but when you make the Austrian megastar look like a method acting genius with the comic timing of Cary Grant on steroids, then it is time to consider a new career.

JCVD might be better off as one of those new male pin ups, the oiled and muscular calendar boys who spice up suburban hen nights. That’s what he looks like throughout Hard Target, even though he is supposed to be penniless and virtually homeless. He’s Hobo-hunk, with spray on stubble, a personal hair stylist and the kind of muscles that require several pounds of steak a day to maintain. When a gang of cardboard cut out villains start treating the homeless as prey in an updated version of The Most Dangerous Game, JCVD reveals himself as Supertramp, disposing of a small army of bad guys with enough high kicks to get him a job as a Can-Can girl.

Hard Target is standard issue macho mayhem, a step above the sordid sadism of straight-to-video pulp but several notches below the big budget, concept conflagrations of Arnie and Sly. Which means that while it is better than might be expected for JCVD it is not as good as might have been hoped for the Hollywood debut of Hong Kong’s violent auteur John Woo.

Films like The Killer and Hard Boiled took the American action thriller genre and pushed it right to the outer limits, but away from his exotic city setting and without the exaggerated black humour of his own scripts, Woo comes over as unexceptional. As usual, he orchestrates endless shoot outs, punch ups, car chases and explosions, but no amount of subtle slow motion, speedy editing and sudden freeze frames can transform the lumpen material into anything akin to poetry in motion.

With the well-oiled Van Damme, the New Orleans setting, slide guitars on the soundtrack and Woo’s penchant for slo-mo, what Hard Target most resembles is a violent version of a Levi’s ad. There is even some aggressive product placement: when Van Damme smashes a bottle over an assailant’s head the Budweiser label is clearly visible.

There are some classic touches (notably when hero and villain come back to back mid-battle against the same wall, pausing to talk and reload before continuing the endless shoot out) but there are not enough of these to convince that Woo is really a pulp artiste and not just a talented hack. “This is not good,” mutters a villain before meeting his demise. I am compelled to agree.