It’s been a pretty big year for Scott Adkins releases and thanks to advances in home movie distribution, it’s now cheap and easy to get your eyes on them legally, even in Aotearoa.
Hard Target 2 and Jarhead 3: The Siege have both recently been released here, and the fourth Undisputed film just premiered at Fantastic Fest. I sadly wasn’t in Texas for that, but it sounds like it delivers the goods. The other two, unfortunately, don’t reach the lofty heights Adkins has attained in the past, but nonetheless keep it real as low-budget, R-rated actioners.
The holy trinity of Adkins is Undisputed III: Last Man Standing, Ninja: Shadow of a Tear and Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning. Despite all being sequels with colons in the title, they’re absolutely three of the greatest action movies of the last decade. So forgive me for having higher hopes for Hard Target 2 and Jarhead 3 than their undeniably shitty, direct-to-home-release sequel titles would suggest.
The original Hard Target is a bona fide classic, an all-time great. It’s John Woo’s amazing first Hollywood joint featuring Jean Claude Van Damme’s greatest haircut, Lance Henricksen as a superb villain and a fairly non-stop barrage of inventive, brutal and spectacular set-pieces.
Hard Target 2 is just a mildly entertaining and very forgettable movie.
Adkins plays an MMA fighter who accidentally kills a homie, so gets all down about it and moves to Thailand to do more prize-fighting. He sleeps with a bottle of hard liquor and a bunch of doves perched on him, so you know he’s unhappy and that the director has seen a John Woo film.
He’s lured into a “fight” in Burma, which turns out to be him running through the jungle as rich hunters track him down for fun, like they do in The Most Dangerous Game and, yknow, Hard Target.
After quite a promising start, just how low-brow this film is becomes crystal clear when the hunters are introduced. They’re such insanely lazy stereotypes, it’s kind of remarkable. There’s a Texan father and son who say “herda hadda” or something similar, an actual Spanish bullfighter who does a stupid little jig, and a guy who introduces himself as “the Mark Zuckerberg of the first-person shooter”.
Jesus wept.
Oh and there’s also Rhona Mitra, whose first two lines are “I’m everyone’s type” and “Jesus ladies, do you want to fuck or hunt?” And that’s not even the worst bit of dialogue – that would be when Temuera Morrison sees a dead guy and says aloud to himself “Not good.”
Oh yeah, Temuera Morrison is in this movie! Pretty damn cool. He throws down in it too; shooting up some fools with a crossbow and going mano e mano with Adkins himself.
Action-wise, there’s a fairly big emphasis on crossbows, which is nice. But that and all of the action is directed in a way that reduces impact rather than increase it. The tried-and-true formula of human hunting does fit the southeast Asian setting well, though.
The best sequence by a country mile is the motorbike centrepiece. It starts with a Scott Adkins double jump kick to get two riders on the ground, before he and Rhona chase each other about firing rockets and nets and stuff from the motorbikes. Choice! Then Rhona busts out dual crossbow pistols for a laugh, before exchanging some mental dialogue with Adkins, who then kicks her through a wall.
Aside from that, it’s all mostly pretty dreary, ending on a border bridge between Burma and Thailand, with Adkins fighting a bunch of bad guys, including Tem, in uninspiring close-quarter combat. The Adkins in MMA-mode bits are difficult not to compare to the vastly superior Undisputed stuff, the Burmese army bad guys call to mind the vastly superior Rambo and the human hunting stuff, well, yeah, Hard Target was vastly, vastly superior.
Despite the lols and very mild action thrills, this is a big disappointment that I didn’t enjoy much. It’s lovely seeing Adkins fire a bow & arrow as he flies through the air and all, but this should have been a lot better. It’s only $8 to rent on iTunes though.
Who knew there was a Jarhead 2? Weird. Anyway, Jarhead 3: The Siege is about a bunch of marines repelling terrorists and saving an ambassador when the US embassy in Saudi Arabia is attacked.
Adkins plays a badass senior US marine who’s fairly stern all the time, but only because he’s real serious about looking after the boys. He performs exactly zero fist fights, sadly, but does plenty of shooting, including some really beautiful sniping. The gun porn in this is really pretty grand, exhibiting a nice range of firepower and ensuring we see the casings flying about and such.
The main boy lead actor is so earnest and all-American in that kind of ’80s action way, it gives the whole film this really cute, sincere, almost childish vibe. That one of the major shootouts happens at a place called ‘Freedom Burger’ helps that vibe out too. God bless the marines, and God bless burgers!
Obviously, such naivety also results in some pretty hilarious dialogue. It’s admirable that the film does make efforts to show good Saudis and Muslim characters, rather than have them all evil. Even the main bad guy is given a moment to explain his motivations, which aren’t the generic extremist psycho-babble you’d expect in a bone-headed script like this, but are rather fairly reasonable. The terrorists are also particularly skilled soldiers, just as good or even better than their American adversaries both with guns and in a couple of fist/knife fights.
It doesn’t take long to get into the action and once it starts, it’s pretty much a relentless gunfight right to the end. The R-rating means plenty of blood clouds as heads snap backwards and so on, but the director rarely gives a decent idea of geography or delivers anything special with the editing.
Despite being pretty much a poor man’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi and despite Adkins not being the main man, Jarhead 3 is still an enjoyable enough action film. Don’t rush to see it or anything, but if you want to laugh at bad dialogue and see a movie that has several thousand rounds fired off when you’re hungover or whatever, hiring this on Blu-ray could be just the ticket.
The next time we see Adkins won’t be in a direct-to-DVD sequel – it’ll be alongside Benedict and Mads in Doctor Strange. And that looks mint.
