Hard Gun (1996)

Tagline: This movie is fucking called Hard Gun.

Curiosity: It’s one of Tony Jaa’s early films. Also it’s called Hard Gun. WHAT. UP.

Plot: After a gang of bandits gets into a shootout with some cops, their leader (Panna Rittikrai) swears revenge on the policeman who killed his brother Norm. When this officer returns home to visit his family, he finds himself in a rather sticky situation. As if fighting methheads wasn’t enough, now he’s got Rittikrai and a young Tony Jaa to contend with. Hilarity ensues. Also, kickings and shootings.

Thoughts: I appreciate Hard Gun for what it is, an action/comedy that showcases Jaa’s talents as a martial artist but doesn’t emphasize his ability like The Protector. He gets to show some very brief but nice stuntwork in the beginning, but Jaa ultimately doesn’t factor into the movie until the last 20 minutes. His big fight scene at the end looks pretty good, but it’s nothing compared to the four years of intense training that culminated in Ong-Bak. Bearing in mind that he was only like 20 when he made Hard Gun, though, I respect his results.

The rest of the movie, though, is a long, slow walk through people who aren’t Tony Jaa. Hard Gun oscillates too wildly in tone. The fight scenes are brutal, especially one scene where a drug addict beats his wife in public, but the humor is so slapsticky that it clashes with the violence. It doesn’t balance it out so much as undercut it. Yet in spite of this shortcoming, the story is surprisingly well-rounded for an action movie. When the fight scenes do roll in, they’re powerful. The film is often funny, though unintentionally so, like when an actor looks straight into the camera and says that drugs ruin society. It could not get any more PSA than that. Still, I can only recommend this film to people who already like Jaa’s work. Ong-Bak and Protector assert Jaa as the successor to Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li. Hard Gun helps explain how he got there, but that won’t make it any better for the uninitiated.

Reflection: DON’T GOOGLE “HARD GUN.”