Hard Target (1993)

Jean Claude Van Damme and John Woo went Hollywood pro in “Hard Target,” a grisly, loud, and corny 1990s action blast that takes on the short story “The Most Dangerous Game” with a GOP spin. You know the original: Men are hunted as sport by other men with guns. Here, the hunted are New Orleans poor and homeless, while the hunters are rich white CEO types with a kill dreams and a copy of “Atlas Shrugged” by the bedside. The poor are leeches on society right? Republican cheer! Sorry. Could not resist. The plot kicks off with a young woman (Yancy Butler) searching for her vet pop who turns up a corpse from such a hunt. With police useless, she hires a drifter –- that’s Van Damme –- to catch the killers. Luckily this guy has crazy martial arts skills to fight all wrongdoers who mean her harm. Woo’s style -- doves, fireworks, ballet jumps with guns -– is plentiful and spectacular. But the slo-mo shots of Van Damme tossing around his filthy swamp boy mullet as if he were in a trailer park shampoo commercial just cringes, and brings unintended laughs. Quibbles aside, “Target” is remains Van Damme’s sharpest American effort. B+

Seeking Justice (2012)

“Seeking Justice” has an intriguing premise –- a New Orleans husband in a fit of anguish agrees to have killed the man who assaulted his wife, only to learn he has to commit a hit on his own in reciprocation –- but quickly stumbles. A low-broil Nicolas Cage stars as the distraught Will Gerard, who is confronted in the ER waiting room by Guy Pearce as the devil with the Faustian revenge pact, sporting a scumbag vibe so thick, it chokes the air. Clearly, Will never watched “Ghost Rider,” or heard of Faust despite being an English teacher. So the plot kicks off and the coincidences stack high as everyone -– even those closest to Will –- is in on the game, and our hero sports 007 skills to survive. Directed by Roger Donaldson, “Justice” has that striking “What would you do?” idea upfront, but it’s never in doubt that Will will do right, his wife will believe him, and Pearce will monologue. Once titled “The Hungry Rabbit Jumps,” the film smells of a tedious production that paved over a good, taunt script for tired Hollywood thriller action car chases and shoot outs. C

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

Nicolas Cage – the actor of “Wild at Heart” – has been missing for some time, replaced by a flaky, tired and boring stand-in in such garbage fare as “Bangkok Dangerous.” In the police thriller “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” Cage is once again thrillingly alive, electric, giving a high-wire act, and knocking every other player off to the sidelines. He drops out-there dialogue like “To the break of dawn!” with absolute relish, hitting every syllable in the strangest and darkest of ways.

This Werner Herzog-directed flick has nothing to do with Harvey Kietel’s 1992 flick “Bad Lieutenant,” except name and its general outline: A depraved, drug-addled police detective is on a fast train to hell as he investigates a disturbing crime. Here it’s the murder of a New Orleans family of illegal immigrants, apparently over drugs the caretaker was selling.

Cage’s Terence McDonagh is off the bat corrupt, but in a flash of kindness he saves an inmate from drowning in the 2005 Katrina floods. No good deed goes unpunished: Terence injures his back in the rescue. A doctor’s prescription of painkillers leads to hard drugs and so many crimes – blackmail, sexual assault, shakedowns and pointing guns at grannies. Let’s put it this way: Our hero has a “lucky crack pipe.” It’s telling of Terence’s flamed soul that his lowest point in the film is when his call girl lover (Eva Mendes) announces she’s going into rehab.

His back and shoulders hunched like a walking “7” and a gun shoved in his front belt like a calling card of a psychotic Western lawman of about 16, Cage hasn’t been this good in years: All big-eyes tender one minute with a baby and raging crazy the next, even scaring hardened gangsters. Cage’s eyes are glaring mad, and I’m not sure how he does it. I’m not sure I want to know. But the actor last seen in, I swear, 1997’s “Face/Off” is back. (For now. He is doing a “Ghost Rider 2” after all, a bunch of other garbage, too, God help us.)

This Herzog tale is dark as hell, grisly violent, and strange – David Lynch strange – but it’s also wickedly funny. Terence hallucinates creeping spying lizards, and as the film reaches its climax – well, let’s say, I’m not quite certain reality is all there. The ending, actually, is quite hysterical, if you can get past the horrible acts Terence commits. This might be a difficult film for some to stomach. I dug it. A brimstone comedy from hell. And the most exciting big-screen police thriller I’ve seen in ages, good news for a genre that has played it as safe as an episode of “Law & Order” for too long. New Orleans has never, to my knowledge, been this gritty onscreen before. This ain’t Bourbon Street fun and partying. It’s a third world country, where signs of mass death from a deadly storm are marked – literally – on nearly every home. A-