Hard Target

Really, is there anything more majestic than Wilfred Brimley on horseback with a bow & arrow? Is there? There is? Oh, ok.

Well anyway, I just watched, or glanced at actually, bits and pieces of Jean Claude Van Damme's movie Hard Target. It was set in and around New Orleans, from what I saw, and they really seemed to play fast and loose with the geography. The opening scene was of a man being hunted by a mish-mash group of incongruously calm and sophisticated-looking sickos and dark-helmeted motorcyclists ("bikers" would be a misnomer) in the French Quarter. Cut to the same man running from same sickos and motorcyclists across the river on the west bank, making his way over the levee, supposedly to reach the safety of his small boat on the river. He is shot down with a crossbow. (IIRC, crossbows were big in the early 90s.) In the next scene, a woman is driving from the west bank (the side where the guy was killed) to the east (the side where the French Quarter is) and the gondola towers left over from the '84 world's fair can clearly be seen. Perhaps the guy eluded his pursuers by crossing over on the cables. It would be quite a feat as there were no gondola cars in sight.

At this point I was absorbed in installing Visual C++ 2005 Express (a free download from MS along with other programming languages) and the Windows Platform SDK so I missed most of the movie. I guess.

When I next looked over my shoulder, there was Wilfred Brimley, not yet on horseback, taking aim with his bow and arrow. He shoots, narrowly missing the lead antagonist, but hitting his intended target: a can of whoop-ass in the form of bottles & jars of highly volatile & flammable liquids that ignite on the impact of the arrow. BOOM! Bad guys aflame. Lead antagonist shows he's a nice guy in an evil sort of way by mercy killing a flambe'd bad guy. The the dynamite goes off and Brimley takes off on horseback after taunting the baddies and attracting a hail of pitifully aimed automatic gunfire and one grenade or rocket or something that hits a convenient shed. The picture above is the best I could find. It does not do justice to the scene, which includes a slow-motion shot of Brimley bouncing on his galloping horse towards the camera as the Convenient Exploding Shed explodes behind him.

Then I returned to my task of configuring VC++ to use the platform SDK. Maybe if I actually get around to learning to program in C I'll blog a bit about that.