Further Proof That I'm a Nerd and a Geek

I put on another John Woo action film, 1993's Hard Target, starring Lance Hendriksen, Arnold Vosloo, and Jean-Claude Van Damme. This is Hendriksen's favorite movie, because Woo did not cut any of his character development scenes. Hendriksen runs a human hunting ring, and Vosloo is his number one heavy. Van Damme is a Cajun drifter helping Yancey Butler, whose father was one of Hendriksen's earlier trophies.

I laughed every bit as hard at this one as I did Mission: Impossible II. One of the set pieces demonstrates that Woo has been doing the absurd gun and motorcycle stunts that he put in M:I2 and made me laugh out loud and compare him to the Marx Brothers. It involved the hero standing on a motorcycle while shooting a pistol and driving straight at an SUV with a gunman returning fire, using a submachine gun, and leaping to vault over the SUV as it runs over the motorcycle. There's also a bunch of pigeons flying around at the climax, aparently another John Woo hallmark. The hero clearly has the Rambo Effect going for him (90% of shots fired at Short range or closer automatically miss), and he regularly pulls off all sorts of impossible shots himself. Woo's bullet squibs are impossibly pyrotechnical. Every single shot sends showers of magnesium sparks flying from the sets and props. Many of them send bits and pieces of the scenery flying around like rockets. As I said, absurdly funny.

So, have you ever had an inappropriate reaction to a movie? Would you like to tell me about it in the comments?