Hard Target 2 (2016)

Director: Roel Reine

Notable Cast: Scott Adkins, Robert Knepper, Rhona Mitra, Temuera Morrison, Ann Truong, Adam Saunders, Jamie Timony, Peter Hardy, Sean Keenan, Troy Honeysett, Amarin Cholvibul, and a cameo by Jeeja Yanin

“You have something that belongs to me.”
“A false sense of superiority?”

The mining of nostalgic franchises is not new to the realm of straight to home video. While people seem up in arms about theatrical movies rebooting/remaking/franchising classic series, this has been a very popular thing to do in the home video market for decades. So is it all that surprising that a sequel to Hard Target would be hitting store shelves, VOD, and Netflix 23 years after the original hit theaters? I, for one, am not inherently against the franchising of older films for a newer generation as long as the film works. In the case of Hard Target 2, it does. It works much better than I could have ever hoped for a straight to home video actioner. While the film is hardly perfect and certainly has that low budget ‘do what you can with what you have’ kind of tone to it at times, it’s such a focused and entertaining film that it hardly misses a beat to give action fans a bit of what they want out of a film like Hard Target 2.