Hard Target(1993)
Hard Target is a 1993 American action film directed by Hong Kong film director John Woo in his U.S. debut. The film stars Jean-Claude Van Damme as Chance Boudreaux, an out-of-work homeless Cajun merchant seaman and former United States Force Recon Marine who saves a young woman named Natasha Binder (Yancy Butler) from a gang of thugs in New Orleans. Chance learns that Binder is searching for her missing father (Chuck Pfarrer), and agrees to aid Binder in her search. They soon learn that Binder's father has died at the hands of hunt organisers Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) and Pik van Cleef (Arnold Vosloo), a pair of a ruthless businessman and his right-hand mercenary, who arrange the hunting of homeless men as a form of recreational sport. The screenplay was written by Pfarrer and is based on the 1932 film adaptation of Richard Connell's 1924 short story "The Most Dangerous Game".
Hard Target(1993)
A lot of bad movies star Jean-Claude Van Damme, and a lot of bad movies are ripoffs of "The Most Dangerous Game," but Hard Target is the only bad movie that is both of those things. It's also one of the few Van Damme movies to feature a character who is harder to understand than he is, and the only one where it's Wilford Brimley. It might be the only film in which Van Damme punches a snake, but I wouldn't bet on it. Van Damme seems like the kind of person who has punched more than one snake in his life.
A nonlinear optimization method was developed to solve the inverse problem of determining the shape of a hard target from the knowlegde of the far-field pattern of the acoustic scattering wave, it was achieved by solving independently an ill-posed linear system and a well-posed minimization problem. Such a separate numerical treatment for the illposedness and nonlinearity of the inverse problem makes the numerical implementation of the proposed method very easy and fast since there only involves the solution of a small scale minimization problem with one unknown function in the nonlinear optimization step for determining the shape of the sound-hard obstacle. Another particular feature of the method is that it can reproduce the shape of an unknown hard target efficiently from the knowledge of only one Fourier coefficient of the far-field pattern. Moreover, a two-step adaptive iteration algorithm was presented to implement numerically the nonlinear optimization scheme. Numerical experiments for several two-dimensional sound-hard scatterers having a variety of shapes provide an independent verification of the effectiveness and practicality of the inversion scheme. 041b061a72