Double the Van Dammage: Hard Target (1993) and Street Fighter (1994)

Unfortunately, these are the last two films in my Van Damme quadruple feature DVD set. But don't worry, I bought another one, this time with even weirder straight-to-video stuff. It should make for some enjoyable Van Dammage in the future. Stay tuned.

Hard Target (1993)

This one's probably most famous for being really weird. Van Damme, sporting a mullet worthy of the Hall of Fame, plays Chance, a Cajun with a shifty past and some mad kung fu skills. He's hired some lady looking for her missing father. They quickly find out, however, that he was killed by a rich butthole who hunts homeless Vietnam vets for sport. Naturally, there's revenge to be had. Hard Target is an exercise in absurdity: each scene is exponentially weirder than the last, with the chase sequence in the Bayou being by far the weirdest. Even for a Van Damme film, this one is a bit out there. In terms of the martial arts, there's not much here. There's a few decent fights, but they're almost all filmed in super slo-mo. In a way, they're perfect for a poser like Van Damme, but the choreography is substandard, particularly in comparison with Van Damme's contemporaries in the genre. But as an action film more generally, Hard Target is beautifully unselfconscious. There's not a single halfhearted idea or concept thrown out there; rather, each stupid idea is followed to its "logical" conclusion. As long as you don't go in expecting a martial arts tournament, Hard Target is one of the better Van Damme films.

Street Fighter (1994)

And this one's probably most famous for being really awful. Truly, who knows what in the world is going on in this film. Our friend Van Damme is Guile, a military man tasked with finding the nefarious M. Bison, who has kidnapped some innocent folks and is holding them up for ransom. Bison has also turned one of Guile's pals into a green mutant because he hates him so much. Consequently, Guile gathers up some allies to launch an attack on Bison's hideout. It all leads up to one of the most nonsensical set-piece finales in any film. Street Fighter is poorly acted, poorly scripted, poorly shot, poorly edited, and poorly lots of other things, but really, the fundamental problem with the film is that there's actually very little fighting in it. There's plenty of action movies with more idiotic plots than this one (certainly with worse acting), but for a movie based on a fighting game, I need more than two or three combat sequences because the sub-slapstick comedy in this one was not working for me. This film makes the Mortal Kombat adaptation look Citizen Kane, if only because the brain trust behind Mortal Kombat had the common sense to make a fairly straightforward martial arts film. Street Fighter is somewhere between a made-for-TV children's special and a rather meandering adventure film. And in that sense, it's unsatisfying on nearly every level. The few scenes of one-on-one combat are ruined by a style of editing that most closely resembles epilepsy. And even for fans of Van Damme, there's little to like about the big lug's role: a few spin-kicks are thrown in there, sure, but not much else, not even the splits. Street Fighter doesn't even reach the ridiculous "highs" that something like Double Team stumbles fortuitously upon. I can only recommend Street Fighter for serious Van Damme devotees.

PS3 Review: Injustice: Gods Among Us (2013)

Injustice: Gods Among Us has a really neat concept: Superman, tricked into killing Lois Lane and all of Metropolis by the Joker, goes crazy and establishes himself as a despot. That's how it seems at first, anyway. Unfortunately, things get messy pretty quick as the plot devolves into the incomprehensible clone/double/alternative universe babble all too common in superhero comics. I've never understood why the whole alternate universe idea in comic books has to be justified so literally, that is, within the narrative, but nonetheless, it gets all the good guys and bad guys to fight each other, so who cares.

Despite its disorganized storyline, however, Injustice is a fine game. Returning for a moment to the story, I can say that however much I dislike the conceit, it's told in an excellent manner, and by that I primarily mean the animation and voice-over. There's a nice balance struck between comedy and hammy drama so that things never get too cheesy or easygoing. This is buoyed by the well-written dialogue and delivery of the actors, a quality which certainly carries over from the cinematics to the gameplay. Injustice is a smooth fighting game in the vein of Mortal Kombat. Button combos require some skill to memorize and master, but they aren't so intricate that you have to frequently pause the game to remember moves. And Injustice is right about where it should be in terms of depth: not intimidating for newbies, but deep enough for the hardcore fighting fans. True, the main story mode is fairly short, but it's involving and has plenty of variety. Unlike other fighting games, where you are often locked into playing as a particular character for the duration of the quest, Injustice keeps things nimble: one minute you're playing as Batman, the next Green Arrow, the next Joker, the next Wonder Woman, the next Deathstroke. You spend just enough time with any of them to learn their attributes and moves before moving on, and more specifically you get to try out their super finishing moves, all of which are beautifully complicated and unnecessarily over-the-top. Same goes for the interactive environments. Most arenas in the game consist of multiple levels for combat, and transitioning between the upper and lower floors of the Batcave, for instance, only requires the proper positioning and timing, and it deals out a considerable amount of damage to your opponent. There's also ample opportunity to use the environment to your advantage in other ways: swinging from chandeliers, throwing cars, and so on. Once the main story is finished, though, you can take all these skills and find plenty of other things to do: besides Battles, in which you take any hero/villain in the game through a ladder of increasingly difficult adversaries, there's also a bevy of S.T.A.R. Labs missions to complicate (similar in many ways to TimeSplitters' Challenge modes), not to mention the on- and offline multiplayer options. I imagine this game is going to have some shelf life, especially for DC fans. As a result, Injustice is definitely the best fighting game I've played in a while, one worth picking up.