To sum up, "The Hard Way" is a B movie actioner that will fail to give you much excitement, and you'll quickly and completely forget about it after a few days of watching it. The fault with the movie does not lie with its star Michael Jai White - he is as charismatic as ever, and he does put in a lot of effort with his performance and in fight sequences. Instead, the fault lies with the movie writer and director, Keoni Waxman. The script is very familiar, so there are absolutely no surprises, even with the so-called "surprise twist" near the end of the movie. As for Waxman's direction, though he occasionally generates a little heat with the action sequences (though more often than not they are kind of choppy), his direction is often pretentious (what's with the black and white moments and the freeze frame moments?), poorly photographed, makes the Romanian backdrop look like it was filmed in Montreal, and sluggishly and leisurely paced. Though the end results are a little better than the terrible direct to video Steven Seagal movies he cranked out in the past, one will still question why Waxman still is in business after all these years. He has to learn the hard way that he simply can't cut it as a filmmaker.
