Past Misdeeds: Legionnaire (1998)

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.

1925. Thanks to a combination of bad luck and bad planning, boxer Alain's (Jean-Claude Van Damme) attempt to flee to America with the abused girlfriend (Ana Sofrenovic) - who also happens to be the woman Alain once left standing at the altar - of a Parisian gangster ends with Alain's best friend as well as the gangster's right hand man/brother/I'm not sure dead, the girl back in the gangster's hand, and the gangster in a very vengeful mood.

Alain sees joining the French Foreign Legion very very quickly as his only way out, so he soon ends up in beautiful Morocco, going through the usual trials and tribulations of basic training, including malevolent Germans (the film really doesn't seem to like us much), before he can even begin to do imperialism's dirty deeds. During training, Alain grows close to African-American Luther (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a man foolishly hoping for less racism in the Legion, former British officer and owner of a gambling problem Mackintosh (Nicholas Farrell), and Italian Guido (Daniel Caltagirone), a character whose propensity to show around a photo of his fiancé whenever he can dooms him from the start.

Together, the friends try to survive incompetent officers, Berber attacks, and the vagaries of their own psychological damages; and these are just the problems they have before some of the gangster's men arrive, at which point betrayal might become an additional problem, though one that might be less important than it seems once our heroes (or what's left of them) have to survive actual military action, something the French Legion - the one of this film at least - does not look particularly well prepared for.

If you go into Peter MacDonald's Legionnaire expecting your typical Jean-Claude Van Damme action vehicle (not that there's anything wrong with them), you'll probably be sorely disappointed, for the only thing the film at hand shares with one of those apart from Van Damme is its love for the "redemption by having everyone you care about getting slaughtered" plotline, though even this comes in a variation that doesn't care for or about the usually ensuing vengeance of the hero at the end; if you think about it, it's actually a morally superior kind of redemption. What we have here instead is a movie that goes back to style, form, and plot of the legionnaire films of decades earlier, with a lot of emphasis on the melodrama of male friendship, and, this being a JCVD film, our hero's naked ass and buff chest. By now, I'm pretty sure I've seen JCVD's behind as often and closely as the breasts of a lot of female exploitation movie actresses, which, despite my general disinterest in male anatomy, seems like a very good and inclusive thing to me. But I digress.

MacDonald and writer Sheldon Lettich (well, and supposed story co-author Van Damme, but you know how it goes with co-writing and producer credits for lead actors) actually take the old-fashioned sub-genre they are working in here quite seriously, making no attempts to squeeze in ways for Van Damme to do the splits or use THAT KICK that just wouldn't fit into the film at all, but instead take Van Damme seriously as an actor of limited range but some experience and charisma perfectly able to play his role straight without a need to distract us with more than his bum. JCVD uses the opportunity well, turning Alain into a guy to root for, which is all I ever ask of my movies, and is often not what I get from action movies (a genre that still applies to Legionnaire in the broadest sense). He is of course helped by some good performances by Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Farrell and Caltagirone, whose efforts keep him away from the slight stiffness Van Damme's performances often tend to slip into.

Despite neither the characters nor their fates being any kind of surprise, MacDonald manages to interest an audience (well, at least me) by virtue of a natural feel to the clichés they are made from; there's a degree of actual human warmth in the scenes establishing the friendship of the main characters that gives their expected demise a degree of emotional resonance I found rather unexpected. As always, it pays off if a film cares enough about its characters to make its audience care too. It also - always and in this particular case - pays off when a film in the business of dramatizing men throwing their lives away for "honour" interprets "honour" as "acting like a decent human being in situations not conducive to it".

Larger amounts of violence only arrive in the film's final third, once the characters stumble into one of those siege situations you'll nearly always get in a legionnaire movie. Once the action starts, it becomes quite clear that MacDonald (also responsible for Rambo 3, by the way) knows what he's doing in this regard too. While there's no ultra-spectacular set piece, Legionnaire is very good at making its few battles short, chaotic, and violent without confusing its audience about what's going on; these scenes fulfil their function in the plot well, yet are also staged in a way making it clear they are not meant to be the core or heart of the movie they are in.

There is, of course, something deeply problematic about even the movie's slight glorification of an institution like the Foreign Legion, an organization I find practically impossible not to describe with a phrase like "crushing boot of imperialism". The film contains some slight nods towards the idea that, you know, perhaps the "rebelling" Berbers are just protecting themselves from brutal oppression, and even allow them to be the enablers of what little of a happy end there is by virtue of actually having virtues. For most of the time, however, the film is making its life a little too easy for my tastes by just ignoring the politics of the situation and only looking at the personal of its legionnaire heroes without truly connecting both things.


Still, despite these slight misgivings, Legionnaire is not just an excellent example of what Jean-Claude Van Damme is capable of in the right environment but a fruitful and effective exploration of a more melodramatic and emotionally complex style of male friendship based movies (surely, there must be a better word for this than the horrible "bromance"?) than the usual buddy movie style you get in US action films.