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Hard Hunted cast: Dona Speir, Roberta Vasquez, R.J. Moore, Rodrigo Obregon, and Cynthia Brimhall writer and director: Andy Sidaris 98 minutes (R) 1992 Malibu Bay/Ventura DVD Region 0 retail RATING: 8/10 reviewed by Rob Marshall |
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The camp yet cool one-liner puns (bumbling hitmen Wylie and Coyote provide judiciously timed comic relief) and colourful tongue-in-cheek fight scenes are industrial strength, and complement some genre-breaking characterisation regarding agents' competence, so there's a hunky macho-looking hero who just cannot shoot straight, while the blonde heroine never needs rescuing, no matter how desperate a scrape she's in. This is a lark and half, ok? It's a hoot, a jape, an escapade, and one of those simplistic adventures that really should not work at all. On the surface, Hard Hunted is chock-a-block with movie clichés, but in spite of its unashamedly obvious (upfront!) content, the narrative entertains because, unlike those often-drearily sexist 007 pictures ("Even James Bond takes time out for sex," quips one of our heroines before she beds her boss), it doesn't take itself too seriously.
The filmmakers want to have their cake and eat it, and here they succeed yet again. They have a cast of beautiful women and handsome men (as if to say - 'we got both kinds of bodies, hard and soft'), photographed in brilliant sunshine on gorgeous holiday locations, using lots of appealing hardware - such as executive jets, light planes (piloted by our lethal ladies, of course), luxurious cruisers and speedboats, ACME hovercraft, custom-built gyrocopter, and a pretty impressive armoury of machine guns and various pistols - all standard equipment for any self-respecting spy movie. But, most importantly for a comedy-thriller like this, viewers are invited to laugh along with the actors' ersatz heroism, and off-duty hedonism, not at them.
Babes with federal clout and the firepower required to backup such authority is quite a beguiling, fetishistic fantasy. If we must have screen heroes who wield life or death forces over criminal masterminds and sundry homicidal henchmen (here including formidably moustachioed ninja, Al Leong, the torturer from Die Hard), well, there's certainly no harm done if they look like this, right? Donna, Nicole, and the amazingly curvaceous Edy (Cynthia Brimhall) make the star trio from Charlie's Angels look like a sorry bunch of St Trinian's schoolgirl rejects.
The DVD has full-screen picture, extras: Locations featurette, profile of Julie K. Smith, another in the series of Andy Sidaris Film School short documentaries, interviews, stills gallery, a dozen trailers, commentary track which has director Andy irreverently describing everything that we see on the screen until producer Arlene interrupts him to offer some genuinely interesting info about the making of this movie (hah-hah, they really are a married double-act!), and an video intro featuring topless Amazonian, Julie Strain.
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