Past Misdeeds: Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012)

aka Universal Soldier IV

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Even after the positive buzz by people whose opinions I respect, I did expect this new addition to the Universal Soldier franchise to be at best a decent bit of cheap-o US action cinema with one or two hints that director John Hyams has seen Apocalypse Now in it. However, what I actually got was so much more.

This is another movie with themes quite close to the spirit of Philip K. Dick. One should probably wish filmmakers to be inspired by more contemporary SF too, but then I'm already happy when filmmakers read anything at all. It's an amnesiac's (Scott Adkins, stuntman/martial artist turned actually rather good actor) attempt to understand why a certain Luc Devereaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme at his most disquieting) brutally murdered his wife and kid during a home invasion, and his subsequent quest to take vengeance. This rather typical plotline is permanently enhanced and deconstructed by twists, turns, and ideas concerning the nature of our hero, free will, the uses of memory, and the killing of fathers/gods, all told in a visual style that reminded me most of Beyond the Black Rainbow and Driver (films this one does actually see eye to eye with) in the way it suggests wrongness and disturbed subjectivity with every colour and framing choice.

The whole film has the feel of a paranoid's nightmare full of bleak colours, grimy instead of adrenaline-pushing violence, and a feeling of claustrophobia - all not exactly things you'd expect in an US action movie belonging to a mildly successful franchise that generally always avoided to actually delve into the thematic mire of conspiracy theory and identity horror its basic ideas are so ideally suited to. Reckoning, on the other hand, delves in without ever looking back, pulling the part of its audience willing to go into nasty and confusing places with it, and leaving the kind of people who need to have the plot explained to them afterwards behind on the IMDB where they belong.

It's not only Hyams's ambition to go where Universal Soldier hasn't gone before I admire here, it's that he actually fulfils it, making one of the most off-beat and unexpectedly disturbing action films with a side-line in existential horror I've ever seen.

Past Misdeeds: Hard Target (1993)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

When Nat Binder (Yancy Butler) comes to New Orleans looking for her long-time estranged, now missing, father, she doesn’t expect to find out he was homeless. She certainly didn’t suspect he has become the victim of one of the hunts for the ever popular Most Dangerous Game non-American (possibly even European!) bad guys Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) and Pik van Cleaf (Arnold Vosloo) hold for their rich perverted clients. Their particular shtick is that the hunt’s designated prey consists exclusively of former military personnel who have fallen on hard times; don’t worry though, they’re certainly not going to play fair when helping their clientele getting their victim.

Given how little Fouchon and his cronies care for human life (or a sensible way to keep their hunts secret, now that I think about it), Nat would probably have a rather short life too, if she didn’t fall in early with former special forces super Cajun Chance Boudreaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme, whose accent is totally not Belgian, no sir), a man quite able to turn the tables on these particular hunters. Well, he was born on the Bayou, etc.

Oh, I still remember how cranky I was in the 90s when John Woo’s move to Hollywood turned out the way that it did, with the director seemingly trading downwards in every aspect of filmmaking, and quickly turning all his stylistic idiosyncrasies into mere tics and shtick. Now, more than twenty years later, it has become quite a bit easier to look at the resulting films with a more fair eye, and to possibly even enjoy them.

Sure, the part where Woo’s films were now seemingly crapping doves without any good reason (turns out when you overuse a metaphor this much, it ends up signifying nothing whatsoever) is still there, but when I start to let myself be dissuaded by a handful of random dove appearances, I really should stop watching the kind of films I do. But then, Woo’s particular style of dance-like ultra-violence and slow motion melodrama always was and is a thing teetering on the border of self-parody, as directorial styles following the dogma that style is substance (which I am wont to believe in too) inevitably must be; it’s a question of individual taste where awesome stylized gun opera starts and where silly nonsense begins, or if there’s indeed any difference between them that matters.

Re-watching Hard Target after a decade or so, I realized how close the film actually is to Woo’s Hong Kong work, or rather, how much those films traded in the same kind of silliness and excess. I also realized I’m now very much willing to just go with the sort of world where doves teleport in at the slightest provocation, where crossbow bolts inevitably fly around in slow motion, where gun hands are positioned in the most improbable ways, and where things explode or catch fire for the slightest of reasons, even when the film these things happen in was made in the USA. In fact, I’m at a point in my always regressing taste where I find stuff like this absolutely lovely, and wouldn’t have the film any other way. Particularly when these tasty morsels come with an added dose of kitschy (but not necessarily untrue) poverty porn, the (completely true) insight that all rich people are evil while the poor have dignity and interesting haircuts, as well as a scene where Wilford Brimley rides in with bow and arrow like a particularly absurd version of the cavalry, and shoots as if he were trying our for the role of Old Man Hawkeye. Indeed, that’s all included in the film – even the Brimley stuff that somehow didn’t manage to give 17-year old me, who took these things far more seriously in exactly the wrong way than I do now, a hernia when I watched it way back when in 1993. The resulting film is indeed pretty darn great.

This does – of course – have a lot to do with some other things Woo still was perfectly capable of when he went to the US. Namely, shooting damn great, tight yet overblown (or is it the other way around) action sequences that never bog down in self indulgence so much they are ever anything less than riveting. Woo has an eye for the set piece, a heart for the melodramatic impact of the physical action, for turning a potentially clichéd shoot-out into something memorable by just the right choice of scenery and props, and a – one suspects intrinsic – knowledge of just the appropriate rhythms between camera movement, the bodies of his stunt actors and actors, and editing. There’s absolutely nothing that isn’t great about the action here.

Woo even finds it in his heart to indulge his star’s greatest weakness, and let’s JCVD do That Kick again, and again, and again. It seems to have been an excellent way to get the man to relax in front of the camera too – at least Van Damme does some of his better acting work in this stage of his career here. Why, even his one-liner delivery is for once spot on and even charming. The rest of the cast (except for Yancy Butler who has very pretty eyes and exclusively acts by widening them and letting her mouth pop open and shut randomly) is rather great too, with Henriksen giving one of his patented villain performances with great gusto, and Vosloo working as the perfect foil, while Brimford is appropriately absurd (that’s a compliment), and everybody else dies quite enthusiastically.


So, I’m sorry to add another failure to the list, past me, but you were wrong again. Hard Target is pretty damn great.

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.

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.

Past Misdeeds: U.F.O. (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.

Warning: if you're looking for a "Van Damme movie" with this one, you'll be horribly disappointed. This is rather a movie in which Van Damme's daughter plays a lead role and Dad pops in for a cameo, as any responsible father would.

British friends Michael (Sean Brosnan), Robin (Simon Phillips), Dana (Maya Grant), Vincent (Jazz Lintott), and American Carrie (Jean-Claude Van Damme's daughter Bianca Bree), whom Michael just picked up, probably expected their night out on the town to end with mere hangovers the next day. They get their hangovers all right, but the following morning also finds the area they're living in, and who knows how much of the UK, without electricity, without working phones, and without cellphone coverage. There's also a curious encounter with a ranting tramp (Sean Pertwee in another of the film's cameos) and his spirited yet vague ravings about the end of days. It's more than enough to put everyone on edge, yet on the other hand, how bad can things actually be?

The next day, things become even more curious when all clocks stop and a giant UFO begins hovering in the distance. There are no aliens in sight, no directs attacks, no nothing. Still, our protagonists decide that it's time to stock up on supplies and hole up in their house until they find something better to do. From here on out, everything fastly turns bad for everyone involved: people in movies, it turns out, don't need to be attacked directly to start turning on each other very quickly in a situation like this, and soon, our protagonists find themselves confronted with the vagaries of looting, violent assholes, their own violent natures, and a lot of quotidian terror.

And that's before it turns out there are alien agents around who have taken human form, and the military attacks the alien ship. In between, there's also time for JCVD to pop in, talk into the camera as is late period Van Damme's wont, have one actually pretty awesome action scene, and die.

Given that U.F.O.'s director and writer Dominic Burns was responsible for the pretty damn bad Airborne, I did not go into the film with much optimism. Lowered expectations can lead to positive surprises, but I'm not sure U.F.O. actually needed these lowered expectations to make a positive impression.

Early on U.F.O. is a rather frustrating watch: Burns introduces his main characters in what may be the most annoying club scene I've had to witness in a movie in years, making them look like the kind of total twats you really, really do not want to spend the next ninety minutes with, shakes his camera like an epileptic or a found footage movie, rolls and shimmies and waves his camera around for no particular reason, also likes to tilt the camera sideways with no rhyme or reason, and then adds utterly superfluous short flash-forwards in case there's be anyone left in the audience not already cursing the director after fifteen minutes of movie.

Even later, Burns doesn't let go completely of these directorial tics whose presence I find as puzzling as I find them annoying, but he does calm down a bit and keeps the shaking to the more dramatic and action scenes (though the choreography of the latter really suggests it would have been quite okay to film them so we can actually see what's going on), and leaves off the flash forwards (here, have a random shot of Jean-Claude staring into the camera) completely after half of the film is through.

By that point, a few other things about U.F.O. have become better and clearer too. The badly introduced characters turn out to be a bit more complex and interesting than expected, feeling - though they are based on clear character types - more real and fleshed out than the clichés that often fill our apocalyptic SF/horror films. This even leads to some actual surprises later on: U.F.O. turns out not to be a horror movie where you can tell after ten minutes who will live, who will die, and who will croak first. And that's not something I can say about many low or high budget horror and SF movies.

Burns's script is also surprisingly interesting, with a basic survival plot that keeps completely inside genre rules and tropes but - once the film gets going - does quite a few clever things with them and uses the film's clearly limited resources with creativity and imagination, building an invasion (or is it?) scenario that feels more plausible than its actual silliness would suggest. Even the Van Damme cameo is used with dignity and style (in this the film is the antithesis to his appearance in The Expendables 2), giving the man opportunity to do that glowering into the camera thing he has learned to do so well over the years and have a short but sweet fight. Van Damme's appearance even feels like an actual part of the movie and not something that was shoe-horned in because (one suspects) casting Bree (who is cute and an okay-ish actress here) also provided half a day of JCVD.


When Burns isn't trying to burn the audience's eyeballs out with the shaking and the tilting, he has some rather fine directorial moments. The scene with Dana trapped inside the darkened house with something that may or may not be in there with her is particularly suspenseful and tight, even. In fact, it's at that point (or perhaps two or three scenes earlier) when U.F.O. turns from "neat with moments of horrible direction" into a really likeable low budget movie that's rather exciting, a bit clever, and absolutely worth it to get through the first thirty or forty minutes.

Universal Van Damme: Sudden Death (1995)

After a little girl dies in his arms, super fireman Darren McCord (Jean-Claude Van Damme) has a bit of a breakdown. Now, some undisclosed time later, he’s beginning to work again as a fire marshal in the stadium of the Pittsburgh Penguins, an ice hockey team, or so the film tells me. He manages to get a couple of cards for his little son and daughter for the Stanley Cup finale (whatever that may be).

Unfortunately, the Vice President (Raymond J. Barry) is also visiting that day, and a gang of international evil doers lead by the fussy and rather cruel Joshua Foss (Powers Boothe) has taken it upon themselves to take the VP hostage as the first step in a rather violent and explosion-rich scheme for monetary gain. Because the Secret Service under one Agent Hallmark (Dorian Harewood) is really rather horrible at its job, the VP is soon taken, and the stadium all rigged to blow.

The only thing standing between ice hockey and catastrophe is McCord, who becomes particularly involved once the bad guys kidnap his daughter. Turns out, US firemen not only know a lot about the disarming of bombs but are also really capable killers.

In my recent write-up of director Peter Hyams’s Outland, I mentioned something along the line of Hyams being able to take an exceedingly silly script and make an exceedingly silly as well as exciting film out of it. Sudden Death is to my eyes irrefutable proof of that assertion. This is, after all, a film whose first major action scene consists of JCVD having a fight with an ice hockey mascot using all manner of commercial kitchen utensils in ways that really demonstrate how dangerous of a working place that is, and that gets more bizarre from there on out, finally ending on a physics and logic defying duel between JCVD and a helicopter.

Which, obviously, is a very good thing for the sort of film this is, because a Die Hard variation taking place in an ice hockey stadium with sensible or (ugh) realistic action would probably be boring as well as point out how little sense any of its plot points make. Fortunately, Hyams has things well in hand, with an imaginative array of absurdist action that actually does remind me of the all-out approach of the best of Hong Kong action cinema, not in its directorial approach (Hyams’s way to film action is clear, straight, and exciting but eschews any kind of stylization) but in its shameless willingness to trade in believability for excitement, as well as in its imagination.

Other highlights are a son who doesn’t move even when the stadium breaks down around him (that’s JCVD parenting, folks), a daughter stamping everyone becoming a plot point, Powers Boothe having a lot of fun being a slimy sadist prick whose plans probably would work out better if he’d be less violent, and the fact that there’s pretty much never a dull moment – and only few moments that make much sense – once the film really hits its stride.

Jean-Claude for his part is at the point in his career where his basic acting skills are perfectly fit for the job at hand; and because his character actually does things like bleed and sweat and breathe heavily he’s on the right side of the US action hero equation, where a degree of humanity reigns. Something you particularly learn to appreciate if you’ve seen a bunch of Chuck Norris films in the last few weeks, where anything even vaguely human in its hero seems to be treated as a weakness, even though it’s actually these things that make a viewer root for a hero. Well, that or his parenting skills, obviously.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,jean-claude van damme,peter hyams,powers boothe,action

On ExB: Universal Van Damme: Hard Target (1993)

I know, I know, I’ve said, written and thought some rude things about John Woo’s American phase but now that I’ve settled into zen-like middle-age, maaaan, I’m so relaxed I’m willing to revise this kind of opinion.

So listen to my aged wisdom and click on through to this week’s column over on Exploder Button, where I’ll go deeper into that time when John Woo met Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,action,john woo,jean-claude van damme,lance henriksen,arnold vosloo,yancy butler

Universal Van Damme: The Order (2001)

Rudy Cafmeyer (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is one of those charming rogues and cat burglars one hears so often about, though with a side-line in kicking people in the face, because he’s JCVD. Rudy’s father Oscar (Vernon Dobtcheff), a professor of archaeology doesn’t approve of his son’s lifestyle, curiously enough.

Right now, Oscar is concerning himself with a mysterious and secret (so secret, we will later learn, they’re on the TV news in Israel) sect. He seems to have found the lost final part of the group’s holy book, so off he goes to Israel where he disappears without a trace.

Of course, Rudy travels to Israel to find his Dad, and soon finds himself chased through Jerusalem by bad people with guns as well as the Israeli police. During the course of his adventures, Rudy will team up with honest cop Dalia (Sofia Milos), watch Charlton Heston die, save his dad, fight crazy cultists, and will just perhaps also save the world from total destruction.

For at least the first half of its running time, Van Damme veteran Sheldon Lettich’s The Order is a pretty family friendly action adventure with broad comedic touches, the kind of film you could imagine watching with your imaginary children, at least if you are a desensitised monster like I am. Tonally, it’s an attempt to fuse classic Van Damme-isms like That Kick with elements of the post-Indiana Jones adventure movie and a bit of daft yet pleasant Da Vinci code historical conspiracy nonsense (which did exist long before Dan Brown descended from his spaceship).

The film does grow increasingly strange and a bit more violent the longer it goes on, though, with many a minor character dying while the whole affair’s tone – which started out quite comic-book like anyway – shifts into full-out, yet cost-conscious craziness, with a pretty stupid coup d'état among the sectarians that leaves Brian Thompson in charge to fulfil a dubious prophecy even after he knows the dubious prophecy is actually false, and stupid main henchmen Ben Cross deciding that he’ll still have use for money on his Swiss bank account after he has helped his boss start World War III, and all sorts of off-handed craziness.

The film’s strangest – and potentially offensive to the easily offended, which is to say at least half of the inhabitants of the Internet – part comes quite a bit earlier though, when Jean-Claude disguises himself as a Hasidic Jew to escape police attention only to end up in a prolonged chase sequence full of other dubious national stereotypes (also to be found in the curiously upmarket Pino Donaggio soundtrack) and some Jackie-Chan-lite choreography.

What all this adds up to is certainly not what Serious People will call a good film, but, as somebody perhaps not all that serious, I found myself rather charmed and certainly entertained by The Order’s comic book nonsense, the hammy acting (Jean-Claude is the most subdued actor on screen!), and the all-around cheap professionalism of the production.

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Universal Van Damme: Derailed (2002)

Secret - so secret we never even learn what organization he's working for - agent Jacques Kristoff (Jean-Claude Van Damme, obviously) has a very bad day in front of him. Not enough that his people take him off his birthday vacation to help the thief Galina Konstantin (Laura Harring, totally Eastern European) escape from Slovakia carrying some very secret loot she's selling to his people, a thing sure to anger his wife (Susan Gibney) and kids (Jessica Bowman and authentic Van Damme son Kristopher Van Varenberg) who think he's some sort of business person. No, additionally, the train Jacques and Galina escape on after Jacques explodes some cars is hijacked by international evildoer Mason Cole (Tomas Arana) and his goons, Jacques's family makes a surprise visit on the train and now thinks he's having an affair with Galina, and the very secret loot turns out to be an upgraded variation of small pocks that of course is set free when Jacques starts playing Die Hard on a Train, infecting everybody on board.

Fortunately, Jacques can shoot, knows That Kick, drives motorcycles on roofs of moving trains, and is totally honourable too.

Bob Misiorowski's Derailed, produced by Van Damme's own company in cooperation with the usual suspects (I really need to get around to computing the percentage of Van Damme films involving Boaz Davidson in some capacity), is how I imagine most people not as involved in actually watching these films imagine all Van Damme movies are: cheap, dumb, and full of the sort of ridiculous action movie cheese that either leaves you giggling happily or rolling your eyes a lot (I prefer the former). Van Damme rides a motorcycle on the roof of a moving train for gods sake, and when one of his henchmen tells Cole he fell off doing this, Cole's reaction does not contain words to the effect of "wait, he drove what where?"!

Because doing Die Hard on a Train alone would be a bit too boring (one can't fall behind the achievements of Steven "The Whale" Seagal, after all), somebody involved in the production had the brilliant idea to add disaster movie clichés to the action movie clichés in a gesture I can't help but find quite daring. Not surprisingly, Derailed's interpretation of the disaster movie genre is even more low-rent than that of the action movie (or is it the Die-Hard-alike?), so don't go and expect the one-note characters to be played by Hollywood stars past their prime, or George Kennedy (a man perpetually past his prime). On the other hand, the mild melodramatic contortions the film goes through with small pocks and train engines on fire do result in a complete lack of slack in the film. When Van Damme isn't kicking people in the face, there's guaranteed to be some sort of train problem, a Texan losing his shit over the small pocks outbreak, Van Damme's doctor wife doing heroic disaster movie doctor stuff, or something else to distract a viewer from the horrible emptiness of the universe and the cold glare of the stars.

Given this, you really can't say the film isn't working hard for its money (there are also unconvincing CGI and miniature effects to admire). Sure, it's dumb, sure, it spits on your notions of logic and gravity, but it's also lacking boring attempts at self-irony, and contains lots of scenes of Van Damme doing Van Damme things; though if you're coming for nearly nude Van Damme or ass-shots of our hero, you'll probably leave rather disappointed.

Be that as it may (and heterosexual me has seen JCVD nearly nude so often, I'm starting to get confused when he keeps his pants on), I know, it's only a cheap Die Hard rip-off with disaster movie elements, but I like it.

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Universal Van Damme: The Quest (1996)

It's the 20s of the last century. After various complications that unnecessarily prolong the beginning of the movie, poor American friend of orphans Chris Dubois (Jean-Claude Van Damme) takes part in a very special martial arts tournament that should provide him with a giant gold dragon that'll keep his kids and him off the streets forever. Because it is that sort of film, the tournament proceedings are also the culmination of our heroes' unwitting quest for moral clarity, so he's (alas, only metaphorically) got con artist Roger Moore (in one of his less smug performances) sitting on his left shoulder, and professional boxer James Remar on his right shoulder, pushing him into the directions of wrong and right, respectively.

Apart from that, there are only various violent encounters standing between our hero and his destiny.

Despite my love for martial arts cinema, I've never been too fond of tournament movies, a sub-genre that generates exceptionally mechanical stories even in a genre not exactly known for its variable plotting. Just take a white guy taking the hero's journey (yuck), let him fight a bunch of national stereotypes in some sort of ring while more or less rousing music plays, and you've got your whole film in the can. Frankly, I just find this boring and lacking in imagination or just simple emotional interest, so only a very few tournament (or tournament-centric) movies manage to not bore me, mostly those that either play around with the sub-genre's too obvious structure, or those who really go all out in the martial arts scenes, either via particularly great choreography (nothing all that easily done when fights happen in a ring) or via batshit insanity.

The Quest doesn't belong to any of these more inspired groups, unfortunately. While the fights are absolutely competent, there's just not enough variety in their set-ups to keep up my interest. The silly national stereotypes for their part are good for one or two laughs and one or two moments of eye-rolling but are not good or unpleasant enough to do anything more in the negative, yet are going too far to be able to provide a different sort of interest - say via characterization as actual people and interesting interactions outside of the ring.

The Film is Van Damme's directorial debut, so I'm not too surprised he went for a very safe structure, but it's exactly these particularly safe structures that need someone with experience or just a lot of talent behind the camera to become anything more than an exercise in rote repetition of clichés. As a director, Van Damme is neither. He's clearly a competent director, even competent enough that it seems a bit of a shame he never really tried to make a career out of it, during which he very well might have become more than competent. At the very least, he's an action director who knows when to step back and just let the martial artists and stuntmen show their stuff, even when it's not himself he's stepping back for, and the stuff they're showing isn't all that great.

One can't even blame Van Damme for not having tried anything with The Quest. Before the whole tournament business starts, there's a long-winded attempt to set up the film as Chris's epic story of growth into a responsible adult, but this too is mired down by a lack of imagination. It's rather as if the film were stating that it is going to explore important ideas about moral growth, and declaring its own epic sweep but doesn't quite know how to actually establish them, instead falling back on the sort of cargo cult filmmaking where a director uses signifiers from other movies whose functions he doesn't really seem to understand.

Having said all this, I do think The Quest is a perfectly watchable movie, just not a memorable one, nor one anyone should go out of her way to seek out.

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Universal Van Damme: Maximum Risk (1996)

Nice, France. A man (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is killed after a semi-spectacular chase through the streets of the town. Curiously, the man looks exactly like local police officer Alain Moreau (obviously also Jean-Claude Van Damme). Alain didn't know it until now, but his mother sold his twin brother off when they were both just babies (times were hard, son), and the dead man is his brother Mikhail.

Understandably, Alain feels a rather pressing need to find out who his brother really was, who murdered him, and why. The trail leads him to New York where he soon learns that Mikhail was a member of the Russian mafia, practically the son of the organization's head Kirov (David Hembleu). Various people, among them Mikhail's girlfriend Alex (Natasha Henstridge), think Alain is Mikhail, which isn't all that horrible (though ethically problematic) in Alex's case, but is really rather unpleasant in case of the people who now think they didn't manage to kill Mikhail in niece, particularly slightly lower Russian mob boss Ivan (Zach Grenier). Add corrupt FBI agents and a list containing details about the Russian mafia's network in the US Mikhail supposedly possessed to the mix, and Alain has quite a few people wanting to kill him for one reason or the other. Fortunately, he is a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie character.

To get this over with right at the start: this, Ringo Lam's first movie made for the US market in the US, isn't as good as the director's best Hong Kong films, but then, a lot of his Hong Kong films aren't as good, either; no director shoots a City on Fire or a Prison on Fire with every film he makes.

However, Maximum Risk is still a film very much worth watching. While Jean-Claude Van Damme isn't Chow-Yun Fat, about 1996 when this was made is about the point when he added a degree of convincing acting to the kicks and the gymnastics, and before the drugs and his various other troubles made his performances erratic. So JCVD actually makes something of the opportunities to portrait a guy driven to uncover the secrets of his brother's past at least partly to understand himself the film gives him between action scenes. The script doesn't provide particularly deep insights here, but it's more than enough to make Alain more than just a deliverer of violence and bad puns, and give the film's action a degree of emotional meaning it wouldn't have otherwise. Maximum Risk doesn't go for lame action hero talk at all either, and so escapes the problem of somehow getting its audience to sympathize with a hero whose reaction to killing someone is a quip.

When he's not letting JCVD look oh so meaningfully into a broken mirror or have a desperate toilet sex scene with Henstridge (who doesn't do much of interest otherwise, unfortunately, but manages to keep her love interest out of the awkwardness zone he more often than not enters in romance scenes), Lam does something he's particularly good at, namely racing through a plot that isn't quite as simple as he makes it look, while providing one increasingly frantic yet clearly shot action scene after another.

Really, looking at the action scenes in what isn't even one of the man's best films is a master class in how to stage and shoot action for maximum visibility and maximum excitement, without using the crutches of ultra-fast cuts or particularly showy camera work. Here, the excitement comes from clever and imaginative staging (which is also what you use when you have to work with comparatively little money), and a director who seems to know instinctively how to shoot shoot-outs, car chases, hand-to-hand fights as well as dramatic scenes. What Lam achieves should embarrass ninety percent of directors making direct-to-video action films right now. I'm not usually somebody to shout "Look, this is how it's done right!", but: look, this is how it's done right!

Friends of JCVD beefcake will be happy to hear that he has a particularly homoerotic (it's all that wrestling) fight scene where he and his opponent are only dressed in towels (and underpants). Maximum Risk is actually a perfect example of how to provide appropriate stimulation for people of all sorts of sexual directions. Some may call it all-purpose sleaze or exploitation, I call it equality.

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Universal Van Damme: Replicant (2001)

A serial killer known as The Torch (Jean-Claude Van Damme in a stupid wig, and giving a surprisingly boring performance) has been working in beautiful Seattle for the past three years, punishing women for not being excellent to their children. Not that the police have actually gotten this far in understanding his motivation, for our protagonist, Detective Jake Riley (Michael Rooker, in his incarnation as a consummate professional who really doesn't care what crap a script throws at him, he'll pretend to take it seriously), might very well be the Worst Police Ever, what with his propensity for sudden, uncontrolled violence and his inability to catch a killer who even phones in regularly.

Fortunately for the public, Jake is retiring from his job; unfortunately, The Torch doesn't care and keeps on calling. But don't fret, people of Seattle, the government in form of something called the NSF (so not the infamous data sponge and hater of civil rights) is on the case. Well, actually, they just want to help out on the case to test out their newest program against terrorism, which consists of making clones of terrorists, or in this case our killer, building up a telepathic connection between the clones and the originals, and using the clones as some kind of human blood hounds. Because this isn't stupid enough, our NSF friends decide that the best man to play the replicant Torch's (also JCVD, but doing his puppy-eyed shtick, and gymnastics) handler is Jake Riley. At least it's keeping with the spirit of the rest of the program.

At first, Jake is - of course - abusing the child-like innocent killer clone even when he's not demonstrating a propensity for violence and near-rape (but don't worry, the prostitute falls in love and becomes part of the film's happy end, so there's nothing to see here, right? Right!?), but he is eventually won over by the power of buddy cop movies or of JCVD making puppy eyes at him. But will the RepliTorch still become like his original, or is the much superior nurture of getting abused by a (probably alcoholic) cop instead of getting abused by one's mother going to keep him on the path of angels?

So, let's not put too fine a point on it - as you will have realized, Replicant is not just rather on the stupid side (and I've left out more stupidity than I left in in the above, like the scene in which Rooker's mum basically tells him that he's a poophead, or the "humour" of Van Damme as the replicant trying to understand the guiding principles of toilet paper), it's also thematically and ethically confused like a dog trying to decide if it should dive into that tasty, tasty trash can or rather do what its master says and abstain. As far as I understand the film's morals, abuse is okay when you think your victim is evil, but when you later decide otherwise, the former abuse is no big deal (and your victim will become your best bud); attempted rape isn't so bad when you're a virginal clone (and your near victim will be really into you). Seriously, I don't even know what to say to that, much less how to criticize it in detail. So I won't.

On the other hand, if you go into Replicant and are - like me - somehow able to not find yourself provoked into angrily throwing food at the TV screen, nor into crawling into a corner to shake and whimper to yourself, you might actually have quite a good time with it. There's something very alluring about the film's desperate attempts to hit all the the plot beats of buddy cop movies, include all of the trademark elements of every Jean-Claude Van Damme film ever (the scene of random beefcake, the double role, the puppy eye tragedy, the gymnastics, the idiotic wig on the killer and so on, and so forth), add as many elements of serial killer movies, shake, stir, and look surprised when the audience's heads explode. At the very least, there's never a dull minute here, as director Ringo Lam (who really had better days in Hong Kong) puts out all the stops his tiny budget allows him to, resulting in entertainment. Even if it is entertainment through absurdity, anti-logic, and Jean-Claude looking at toilet paper with greatest confusion.

What there is of action is clearly cheap but good, with a highly localized fight between man and ambulance the clear high point. The fights between Van Damme and Van Damme are fast but not that great, probably because most of the time they have to be choreographed within the constraints of an actor fighting himself, and not in an Evil Dead 2 kind of way. Generally, though, the action still satisfies.

Though really, even if the action were barely watchable, I suspect Replicant would still be worth watching, if only to shout "what the hell!", "are they really going to…?" and "oh, come on!" at the film.

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Universal Van Damme: Death Warrant (1990)

A series of mysterious murders hits a US prison, and the authorities in form of a higher up of the Department of Corrections and a governor soon up for re-election do the logical thing to solve the problem: they import tough guy Quebecois Mountie Louis Burke (Jean-Claude Van Damme in the phase where he added smiling to looking grim, or bored, or doing a shouty face to his thespian catalogue) to go undercover in the prison and find out what's going on. It's all very secret, of course, so only the officials and the governor's assistant - and full-grown lawyer - Amanda Beckett (Cynthia Gibb) know of Louis's true identity. Consequently, Amanda will work as a go-between between the outside and Louis, playing the role of his wife.

Once in prison, Burke first establishes himself as a guy tough enough it's better to ignore him, repeatedly overstepping the bounds of the place's racially segregationist policies during his investigation and making friends with an older African-American prisoner named Hawkins (Robert Guillaume) as well as "the Priest" (Abdul Salaam El Razzac), the leader and pimp of the prison's population of African-American gays, transsexuals and cross-dressers.

Burke quickly learns that the murders take place not just with knowledge of at least the prison's chief warden, Sergeant DeGraf (Art LaFleur), but Amanda and he are also able to puzzle out that there must be somebody quite influential on the outside at least lending protection to the operation. My, whoever could this be?

Things become more dangerous for Burke when an old enemy of his, a serial killer calling himself the Sandman (Patrick Kilpatrick), is brought to the prison, and blows his cover.

At its core, Deran Serafian's Death Warrant is your typical "cop undercover in prison" movie with added scenes of Jean-Claude Van Damme kicking people in the face, and while that's not really the most original thing for a film to be, Serafian's competent direction and David S. Goyer's well-paced (first) script do turn the material into something that's quite entertaining for two thirds of its running time, and seriously silly and awesome for the final third when any ideas of probability are thrown out the window and replaced by the sort of sheer action movie cheese you expect from most Van Damme movies.

There are quite a few excellent moments in the film's final act, like the one where our hero does his patented muscle-pump/shouty-face combination only to get a wrench thrown at his face for the effort, or - clearly one of the greatest moments in cinema history - the one where JCVD kicks the Sandman into a furnace, only to have the burning man jump back out again and continue the fight after a minute or so of our hero looking pretty smug. These moments, as well as some really rather great pyrotechnical special effects, make up for the fact that the action choreography is mostly a bit boring, with Van Damme doing the same kick - and not even THAT KICK - again and again and again, which doesn't come as a surprise in an action movie/mystery combo that doesn't even have a stunt or action choreographer listed in the credits.

Death Warrant - and we are entering mild spoiler territory here, so be warned, whiny people - gets additional bonus points for giving its female character actually something useful (though not spectacular) to do apart from being cute and therefore JCVD's love interest, for not including a scene where she needs to be rescued by our hero, and for featuring an African-American actually guilty of his charge who is still sympathetic, as well as an African-American transsexual, and an African-American of vague yet non-straight sexuality as our hero's allies among the prison population. The film's even letting one out of three black characters live at the end, which may not sound like much, but really is an improvement about the way things generally go in films like these.

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On Exploder Button: Universal Van Damme: Legionnaire (1998)

Delving into the catalogue of somebody like Jean-Claude Van Damme can be a somewhat monotonous proposition, what with so much face-kicking and shouty-facing, so it's nice you're getting something a little different from time to time.

Legionnaire is one of these somewhat different movies in JCVD's career, as I'll explain over at Exploder Button.

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Universal Van Damme: Desert Heat (1999)

aka Inferno

Eddie Lomax (Jean-Claude Van Damme), a man with a vaguely specified violent past, comes to a miniature town in the desert close to what one must assume to be Area 51 and an Airforce bombing range, to ask his old buddy Johnny Six Toes (Danny Trejo) for his permission to commit suicide - and to give him a motorcycle; it's a manly man thing we wouldn't understand, one assumes. Anyway, before Eddie actually arrives in town, he has an alcohol and depression induced breakdown in the middle of the desert, randomly shooting his gun and talking to a hallucinatory version of Johnny. As you do.That scene is interrupted by the three brothers Hogan (David "Shark" Fralick, Silas Weir Mitchell and Jonathan Avildsen) who steal the bike and nearly kill Eddie.

Fortunately, a non-hallucinatory Johnny saves Eddie and mystically babbles him back to life. Turns out the Hogan's are members of one of two gangs of drug dealing evildoers plaguing the area. Eddie - in what must be some particular manly man logic - decides that killing them all might be a good way to get rid of his guilt towards his own past violence and get the motorcycle back, so off he strides playing Yojimbo light in a small town where everyone who isn't a bad guy is totally bonkers.

Most people who have a theory regarding this sort of thing at all seem to believe the time from about the turn of the century to JCVD to be the moment when Jean-Claude Van Damme hit rock bottom. Going by John G. Avildsen's Desert Heat, that's about half of the truth. Clearly, the film isn't what most people would call a good, coherent movie, but watching it, I found myself having fun for most of the time, which really is a perfectly fine reaction for a cheap action movie to achieve.

Desert Heat is one of those action movies whose handful of action sequences are perfectly decent, but that has a lot of time to fill between the amount of fighting it can afford, and sure as hell can't buy its way into an audience's heart by any depth in the script. Fortunately, what the movie lacks in broadness of action and depth of writing, it makes up for with various silly, often adorable attempts at humour (or sometimes "humour") that mostly work because everyone involved seems to be having fun just playing around in front of the camera. It sure helps that the cast is full of character actors like Trejo, Larry Drake, Vincent Schiavelli, and Pat Morita whose reaction to playing in something often very silly isn't to look bored and cash their cheques but to act just as silly as the material they have to work with. This approach sucks the tension out of the film's more seriously dramatic parts but it sure as hell keeps the rest of the movie highly entertaining. It's a lot like watching a bunch of old friends (and most of these actors are really familiar faces you've seen in basically everything) just hanging around, having fun.

Which, come to think of it, is pretty much not what you'd expect to experience when you decide to watch a Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle, of this era or any other, but JCVD is as game as everyone else on screen, so why shouldn't I be?

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On Exploder Button: Universal Van Damme: 6 Bullets (2012)

The thing about a contemporary direct-to-DVD movies featuring our old friend Jean-Claude Van Damme is that you never know what you get: a cameo movie that doesn't really feature Van Damme, or a horrible piece of crap, or something like 6 Bullets, a movie that doesn't use its low budget and nature as an excuse but rather as an opportunity.

My column on Exploder Button does - of course - go into more details about the film. Will Jean-Claude use THAT KICK?

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On Exploder Button: Universal Van Damme: U.F.O. (2012)

Sometimes, it pays off to be patient with movies. Case in point is this low budget Van-Damme-cameo epic about an alien invasion that starts off incredibly annoying but later turns into a seriously entertaining bit of budget SF/horror/action cinema as our ancestors liked 'em.

I provide more details over at Exploder Button, where Van Damme will stare into your very soul!

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Universal Van Damme: Timecop (1994)

In 1994, time travel has been invented (don't you remember?). The US government fastly realizes the danger of the new technology, what with possible ripple effects from changing the past large enough to destroy the universe, so they secretly (I think) open their very own time police.

Just before beat cop Max Walker (Jean-Claude Van Damme) can join this very special new field of law enforcement, some goons assault and nearly kill him and blow up his wife Melissa (Mia Sara) and their home.

Ten years later, in the far-flung future of 2004 when cars drive automatically and don't have any windows anymore, Walker still hasn't asked himself what the hell the attack was all about. Instead, our hero spends his time watching wide-screen videos (a part of the future the film gets very right) of his wife, working the time beat and having a frightening haircut. When arresting his former partner for temporal financial shenanigans, Walker learns of a horrifying conspiracy: senator McComb (Ron Silver) who just happens to control the senate oversight committee for time-coppery plans to buy himself the presidency with money made via the most obvious time manipulations he can think of.

Knowing that McComb is evil and proving it are two very different things, even though the senator has a tendency to go for explosions and violence where subtlety and secrecy would win him the day. Walker will need all his powers of face-kicking and one-linering to save the US from a president who bought his job (which would probably make the first US president who hasn't thanks to him), and perhaps change his own past for the better in the process.

With Timecop, we're already at the tail end of Jean-Claude Van Damme's short career as something of a mainstream movie star. Many direct-to-video action movies and a pretty substantial late-career renaissance should of course follow. Quality-wise, you really can't blame Timecop as a particularly bad influence on Van Damme's career, for this is a perfectly fine example of US SF action of a type that surely isn't going to wow anybody with its subtextual depth and clever plotting but sure knows how to entertain.

Director Peter Hyams is a bit of a specialist for this sort of thing, the kind of working director that can turn a mediocre script (and he generally isn't going to get a better one) into a fun movie without making a big thing out of it. Which does sound like I'm damning him with faint praise, but really, most directors working from mediocre scripts never end up with anything worth watching at all, certainly not with films that are as pleasant fun for ninety minutes as Timecop is.

When it's not going through the expected action sequences - pleasantly enough sequences that consist of more than just Van Damme doing That Kick and the splits, though there is room for both - Timecop also throws its audience's brains some bones. Sure, Ron Silver's plan is utterly moronic (and he's so proud of it, too, for some reason) and the plot is generally obvious, but there are a few nods towards the subversion of genre tropes to keep one interested - particularly when the film threatens to turn into that most dreaded of things, a buddy cop movie, yet then quickly doesn't. Plus, the final thirty minutes or so make good use of the time travel shtick to build up to an actually exciting climax, that also just happens to include the movie's best action scenes (since this is still an 80s movie despite having been made in the 90s, the finale of course takes place in the rain); unlike some action directors I could mention, Hyams does know about the wonders of escalation and what to do with them.

Van Damme is, of course, pretty much Van Damme here - allowed to be a bit softer around the edges than most US action stars, probably kinda pretty if you like the type, and at this point a rather convincing physical actor. Compared even with the first Universal Soldier movie made only two years earlier, Van Damme's performance has improved enormously. While he's certainly not in the business of competing with young Robert De Niro (he isn't trying, and needn't to, obviously), the stiffness and awkwardness has mostly disappeared from his performance and made room for a self-assuredness that fits an action movie star nicely, leaving his part of Timecop just as satisfying as the rest of the movie.

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Universal Van Damme: Universal Soldier: Regeneration (2009)

Let's just pretend Universal Soldier: The Return never happened or was a long dream sequence created by Luc Deveraux's addled mind. It's easier than you think.

In this new, improved timeline, a Russian terrorist group led by a guy named Boris (Aki Avni) kidnaps the children of the Russian Prime Minister, and holes up with them and his small private army right next to Chernobyl reactor number three, wiring the reactor to blow if his demands are not met. To make a bad situation worse, Boris has acquired the services of mad scientist Dr. Colin (Kerry Shale), one of the core developers of a new, improved for the age of cloning and genetic restructuring UniSol project. Colin has brought one of the new UniSol prototypes (Andrei Arlovski) he stole when the project got shattered because of the psychological unpredictability of its subjects with him, providing the Russian with a rather effective one-man defence perimeter for his radioactive base.

Because the Americans are at least half responsible for this little problem, they bring in a bunch of troops and the four last first generation UniSols to take Boris down. Unfortunately, the old UniSols turn out to be no match for the new model, and after they are slaughtered, the remaining soldiers turn out to be even less of a problem for the unstoppable killing machine.

The only chance to disarm the explosives and rescue the kids is now good old Luc Deveraux (Jean-Claude Van Damme) who has been in experimental psychological treatment with a Dr Flemming (Emily Joyce). Flemming's attempts to de-program Luc and turn him into a complete human being again are not very successful. Luc is disoriented, depressed, and still prone to violent outbreaks at mild provocations; one might even think he was happier as a mind-controlled killing machine, or at the very least more at one with himself. Of course, the military-industrial complex has no qualms using him again, if he wants to or not, so his opinion really doesn't matter all that much.

While Luc is being prepared for slaughter, tensions between Colin and Boris lead to the activation of Colin's fail-safe device, a clone of Luc's old enemy Andrew Scott (Dolph Lundgren). Alas, Clone-Scott is in the middle of an existential crisis himself, and we all remember what happens when he starts to think, so the level of chaos and violence when Luc finally becomes whole (that is, a monster) again will be rather higher than expected.

My, John Hyams really is a rather good and clever director of what by all rights should be low-rent, low budget action movies. His UniSol: Regeneration trades in the slight silliness of the first movie and the ridiculous cheese of the second for a somewhat more thoughtful treatment of the whole undead, genetically modified clone warrior business, using the necessary breaks between the ultra-violent punch-outs and shoot-outs to actually try and imagine its psychological effects on said warriors. The film does clearly realize that there's a bitter irony in the fact that Luc, the most fully human UniSol we meet, is much more himself when he leaves his humanity behind; there's already the hint of the UniSols becoming a species different from humanity Day of Reckoning (more about that one at a later date) would go on to deliver lurking in the shades.

Regeneration does not yet crawl as deep down the rabbit hole as the later film does. The comparative thematic complexity in Regeneration is used to enhance the impact of its action scenes, and not the other way round like in Reckoning, but as with most action movies that actually use themes and characterisation (even Boris has actual motives and an implied history to explain his actions), the film does become all the better for it, proving again that carnage is much more interesting when a movie provides the audience with a reason to care. On the negative side, Regeneration's plot is a bit unfocused from time to time, the script clearly working around the fact that Van Damme and Lundgren weren't available (or not cheap enough?) for all that many days of shooting but the film needed to get to length. However, the film's more flabby moments do at least always connect with its thematic interests, so there's never that horrible moment so typical of the way low budget movies have to be produced when scenes have no reason to exist in a given movie at all.

Van Damme gives one of his better performances here, selling Deveraux as a killing machine (no surprise there) as well as an existentially confused human being with the appropriate degree of subtlety. Even Lundgren, generally the weakest actor on this level of US action cinema (unless you count Seagal and Norris, but I've always found it better to ignore those two completely, for moral and political reasons) for my tastes, does rather well in his relatively minor appearance, even using a bit of subtlety in his approach I honestly didn't think think him capable of. The rest of the cast is appropriately good - physically menacing in the case of Arlovski (who actually takes part in more fights than anyone else on screen), scenery-chewing in that of Shale, and so on.

But what, the impatient may ask themselves about the action in this action movie? Well, Hyams is pretty great at staging that too, using the film's industrial building locations and grimy corridors (there are a few equally grimy outside locations too) as creatively as possible under the circumstances, and even finding money for a neat little car chase at the film's beginning. The numerous fights and shoot-outs here are too bloody to be pretty (the director obviously likes a good bit of gore), but are impeccably edited and staged with all the physicality and tempo one can wish for.

If you're like me, and you sometimes start to drink heavily when thinking about the sad state of contemporary low budget action cinema, a film like Universal Soldier: Regeneration comes as a fine antidote for the blues, for its ambition as well as its ability to turn its few resources into something nearly spectacular.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,action,sf,reviews,jean-claude van damme,dolph lundgren,andrei arlovski,kerry shale

Universal Van Damme (sort of): The Expendables 2 (2012)

Shady CIA person Church (Bruce Willis) presses Barney Ross's (Sylvester Stallone) team of biker mercenaries (Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Randy Couture and newbie Liam Hemsworth) into service to catch him a McGuffin out of a safe inside a crashed plane. Because you wouldn't let these guys attempt to crack a safe when you want to keep the things inside it un-exploded, he loans them…a GIRL(!) named Maggie (Yu Nan) with expertise in safecracking, not doing shitty one-liners, and killing people.

Alas, once our heroes have acquired the McGuffin - that turns out to be a computer map showing where the Russians hid a lot of weapons-grade plutonium during the cold war - bad guy Vilain (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and his sidekick Hector (Scott "Totally Russian" Adkins) take it away from them, killing the newbie Expendable who had "guy who will soon die to motivate the heroes' killing spree(s)" tattooed on his face, in the process.

Obviously, the rest of the gang swears vengeance, but there are quite a few people to kill and cameos by Arnold "Couldn't Deliver A Joke If His Life Depended On It" Schwarzenegger and Chuck "Racist Homophobic Prick Whose Comedic Line Delivery Is Even Worse Than Schwarzenegger's If You Can Believe That" Norris to survive before the manly happy end.

Simon West's The Expendables 2 shares a lot of flaws with the first movie: the competent yet curiously indifferent action (a problem that is exacerbated because the film has to convince us of things like Statham being able to beat Adkins in a martial arts fight, Schwarzenegger actually hitting someone when he vaguely points his gun in a direction and wobbles around like an old man way past his prime, that sort of thing), the stupidity of its smugly winking humour, the inability to do anything with Jet Li (whose role is reduced to a mere cameo here anyway), the banking on nostalgia as the film's only reason to exist.

West's film even adds even more problems to these. The film is treating its main bad guy Van Damme as a cameo character who isn't actually in the movie much, which - oh the surprise - turns out not to be something that improves a movie's dramatic weight. For if the film doesn't give a shit about its bad guy, why should the audience care if the good guys can kill him or not? Even when he's on screen fighting, Van Damme is quite underused, an really not allowed to do a move which isn't THAT KICK during his fight (see also indifferent action).

The cameos - and the nostalgia that goes with them - are another of The Expendables 2's problems, because they are handled so badly: the film really is just stopping to pop in Schwarzenegger and Norris (as if anyone wanted the latter) without even attempting to integrate their appearance properly into what little plot there is, and without a care this method kills any tension that might have been left. It's clearly more important to West and his film to have Schwarzenegger, Stallone and Willis exchange old catch phrases and Norris (yuck) make a Chuck Norris joke than to make an action movie with these guys that is actually exciting.

That's a bit of a shame too, for there's a much better (and more entertaining) movie hinted at whenever Stallone, Statham, Lundgren, Crews and Nan Yu (Couture might as well not be there, and I'm honestly not sure if he actually is in much of the film) are allowed a little leeway to just relax, trade comradely jokes and shoot some people in an off-handed manner. Of course, that would be an actual movie and not just boring nostalgia and "irony", and therefore nothing West, Stallone, and co. are interested in.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,action,comedy,sylvester stallone,jason statham,jean-claude van damme,dolph lundgren,bruce willis,arnold schwarzenegger,yu nan,terry crews