Past Misdeeds: 6 Bullets (2012)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

MMA fighter Andrew Fayden (Joe Flanigan), his wife Monica (Anna-Louise Plowman) and their daughter Becky (Charlotte Beaumont) have barely arrived in Bucharest in preparation for Andrew's big comeback fight when Becky is snatched by criminals. What exactly they want with the kid is unclear: the kidnappers don't ask for a ransom, but the case seems dangerously high profile for "just" selling Becky into child prostitution.

Because the local police don't find their daughter in about a day, the Faydens ask the US embassy for help. Someone at the embassy who will later turn out to be Selwyn Gaul (Jean-Claude Van Damme's real-life son Kristopher Van Varenberg playing Jean-Claude Van Damme's on-screen son), sends them to former French Foreign Legionnaire Samson Gaul (Jean-Claude Van Damme) for help. At the moment, Gaul is an alcoholic hallucinating dead children in his butcher shop, but just a few months ago, he was specialized in finding and rescuing kidnapped children by slaughtering child slavers left and right; until he made a terrible mistake caused by his love of explosions which cost the life of four kids. Cue his hallucinations.

At first, Gaul - perhaps quite realistically - doesn't want to take on the Faydens' job; only, if he doesn't try to help them, who will, and is his guilty conscience not in dire need of some redemptive action? Gaul just barely changes his mind fast enough to save Andrew, who starts to try and find his daughter on his own, from a possibly deadly beating. Unfortunately, while Gaul is really, really good at the violent part in "violent investigation", his own lack of subtlety does lead to turns of event that look rather catastrophic, particularly since the whole kidnapping affair is a bit more complicated than anyone could have expected, even involving a part of the Romanian government.

So, is Jean-Claude Van Damme now some kind of reborn Sho Kosugi, providing acting roles for his family wherever he goes? 6 Bullets certainly suggests it, what with the involvement of JCVD's son Kristopher as well as his daughter Bianca Bree (here as Bianca Van Varenberg, for nothing is better for an acting career than using a different name in each movie one is in). Both aren't exactly brilliant thespians but perfectly serviceable for direct-to-DVD action cinema and quite easy on the eyes, so at least in that regard Van Damme's nepotism is a step up from Kosugi's.

Anyway, 6 Bullets is a bit too good to follow cynical lines of thought for too long, so let's talk about something beyond the Van Damme family business. Ernie Barbarash's film hits most of the beats of contemporary direct-to-DVD cinema, though it does avoid the cheap irony popularized by The Expendables and so does take itself quite seriously throughout. Barbarash's action direction is on the steady side, which is to say, you can actually tell what's going on and see enough to realize the choreography of the action sequences is on the more exciting side of competence. Van Damme - fitting for his increasing age - isn't involved in too many hand-to-hand fights anymore, though the ones he is in are pretty cool, and lets guns do most of the violence. This may disappoint major fans of THAT KICK, but I find this approach much more dignified than the magic editing that keeps someone like Steven Seagal alive as if he were the last martial arts fighting whale in sunglasses. Not to worry: unlike Seagal, Van Damme does look like a very fit middle-aged man (fitter than I ever imagined to look, at least), and also isn't involved in nauseating right-wing politics as far as I know. Please don’t tell me otherwise.

Chad and Evan Law's script provides Van Damme with more than enough opportunity to show off his acting talents, too. Now, I know, we all have made fun of young Jean-Claude some time or the other, but at this stage, JCVD has learned to use his limited acting range really well. If it comes to depressed brooding or really disquieting staring into cameras, Van Damme is the action actor you want to cast, and films like 6 Bullets know this and use it to their advantage, giving their killing machine a human dimension, even understandable human motivations.

The Laws' script is rather good and definitely interesting in other regards too. It does contain its share of cheap tricks and silly action movie shortcuts in its plotting, yet it also takes its time to actually build characters, dares to make its plot slightly more complicated than strictly necessary, and even surprises with slight twists on certain genre standards.

I'm particularly glad about 6 Bullets' interest in its female characters. Monica and Becky are at the very least given more character and more lines than usual in direct-to-DVD action films. In a particularly surprising turn of events, the girls in the victim roles - as well as Monica, whose role in a movie like this would normally be to cry and then cry some more - do generally have a larger degree of agency here than you'd expect. Not typical for an exploitation movie (with a plot like this you can't actually avoid exploiting at least the concept of child prostitution), 6 Bullets seems to go out of its way to treat women and children with the same respect as its male characters, without making a big thing out of it.


Combined with Barbarash's steady direction, the solid acting, and the fun violence, this makes 6 Bullets a worthwhile addition to Van Damme's body of work, the kind of film that doesn't need to be all self-ironic about genre tropes because it prefers to do something about the ones it doesn't care for, at least to a degree.