Singular Van Dammage: Kickboxer: Vengeance (2016)

The Van Dammage is back! I watched another Jean-Claude Van Damme film yesterday morning, for the first time in a long time, and now I'm here to tell you about it because this is actually a pretty good one. More Van Damme to come, so stay tuned to Code Redd Net.

Van Damme really isn't in this one a whole lot, but still. He plays Master Durand, who lives in Thailand and trains fighters for underground muay thai combat. Very much like the original Kickboxer, an idiot kickboxing champion takes up a sketchy offer to fight the legendary Tong Po, and his idiot brother lets him. When our reigning champion is killed by Tong Po, his brother, Kurt Sloane, vows revenge and you know the deal. Durand-Van Damme agrees to train him in his idiosyncratic manner for mortal kombat with Tong Po. This involves lots of stretching, as you'd expect.

This is basically a remake of the original film, with Van Damme playing his trainer and a new actor, Alain Moussi, playing Van Damme's role, although there are all kinds of allusions to the previous film which make Kickboxer: Vengeance seem like an alternate universe. This is a fantastic action movie, right up there with recent classics like Mechanic: Resurrection (2016) and xXx: The Return of Xander Cage (2017). In fact, I'd say this probably better than the original Kickboxer, and one of the most effective martial arts films in recent memory. This is a lean action film, with well-choreographed fight scenes, a goofy plot, and plenty of training montages. It just gets the job done in a way that old-fashioned hard genre films should, and, suitably, it builds nicely to the final fight between Sloane and Tong Po, which delivers. I also think Van Damme does an excellent job in his role, playing an effective secondary character who doesn't have to carry the film by, you know, talking a whole lot, which is certainly not his strong suit.

There are some problems, however. For the most part, Kickboxer: Vengeance looks and sounds cheap, and while I sometimes find low production values charmingly nostalgic in action films, in this case they were too bad to even be funny. In particular, many of JCVD's lines are clearly redone hastily with some ADR, with the actor performing the lines doing a horrible burlesque of Van Damme's accent. Nevertheless, KV is a perfect, stupid Sunday afternoon movie. It's rough around the edges, but it definitely delivers the goods in ways that most action films don't anymore.

Double the Van Dammage V: Death Warrant (1990) and Sudden Death (1995)

Hard to believe, but Double the Van Dammage is now in it's fifth installment. Thankfully, there's still plenty more Jean-Claude Van Damme movies out there for me to enjoy, so keep your eyes on Code Redd Net for more roundhouse kicks and mistaken identities.

"What is the nature of being?"

Death Warrant (1990)

JCVD behind bars. The Shawshank Redemption with spin-kicks and splits, if you will. In this one, our hero is a French-Canadian policeguy named Burke, sent undercover in the belly of the beast in order to find out the truth behind some strange prison murders. Burke uses his karate to figure stuff out, and he 'rassles the truth out of his fellow inmates. Naturally, the naive, racially-sensitive Burke has some problems with the prison's gangs, particularly his Hispanic and African-American friends. This is a fairly routine prison film. But, for me at least, there's just something about the routine of prison life that lends itself quite well to linear narrative. That's a nice way of saying I like watching people hatch escape plans and then execute them, and if there's a bit of the splits thrown in there, maybe some sack-punching, perhaps a conjugal visit, all the better. This is an entertaining enough film. All the action scenes are cleanly edited, and Van Damme has some choice lines, and the escape sequence is actually very well done. Some parts are a bit homophobic for my taste, but like, 1990, what can you do? And while some of the plot in the middle could go (the homophobia too), the rest of Death Warrant is, as usual for Van Damme, totally watchable garbage.

JCVG (Jean-Claude Van Goalie).

Sudden Death (1995)

Proud parent and divorcee JCVD (Jean-Claude Van Divorcee) at the NHL Stanley Cup Finals. D2: The Mighty Ducks with spin-kicks and splits and f-bombs, if you will. This time the big oaf's working security at a game in Pittsburgh. A whole bunch of terrorists kidnap the Vice Prez and hold him hostage. Later they kidnap Van Damme's kids and hold them hostage too. These punks are really asking for it. Sudden Death brings the cheese. There's some nice parallel editing between the hockey game and the rescue, as the terrorists plan to blow up the arena at the end of the game. I don't know if it's art, but I like it. The whole NHL gimmick gives Van Damme plenty of room for some absurd action, including his brawl with the Penguins' mascot, and an opportunity to switch places with the goalie for save or two. Van Damme sure loves the old switcheroo, doesn't he? If it weren't for the "confused identities" plot device, most Van Damme films would just be him posing in a mirror for an hour. Hell, that's mostly what they are anyway, but at least sometimes he poses in the mirror under the belief that he's actually his twin brother or whatever. Nevertheless, this is a great Van Damme film, like 4 1/2 spin-kicks to the 'nads out 5.

Triple the Van Dammage: Maximum Risk (1996), Knock Off (1998), and Replicant (2001)

More Van Damme for you. Shockingly, I have even more of his films to watch and review in the future. Stay tuned to Code Redd Net for more clones, twin brothers, cops that play by the rules and cops that don't, and so on.

Maximum Risk (1996)

In this one Van Damme runs afoul of the Russian mafia, and by Van Damme I really mean Van Dammes, as he once more plays twin brothers. It all starts when French cop Van Damme is summoned to a crime scene by one of his partners, where he discovers that his twin brother from Russia has been killed by the mob. He then follows the trail of evidence to New York City and goes undercover as his deceased bro. This includes shagging his girlfriend and only telling her the truth after. JCVD's search for the truth is complicated by a few corrupt FBI guys. This is an excellent stupid action movie. The opening car chase is super fun, and the combat is pretty neat and well-done. Even the production values are better than usual for a Van Damme film. He even has a decent sauna fight, years before Jackie Chan did it in Accidental Spy. That's the thing with Van Damme: very little of what he does really stands out. Van Damme's best stuff is merely solid when compared with virtuosos like Chan. Van Damme is never boring, but he's never that exciting, either. But if you dig the action genre, there's nothing safer than choosing a Van Damme film at random. You know what's going to happen, and he consistently delivers totally competent, short, inoffensive, and dumb movies. You can unwind to Van Damme. In that sense, Maximum Risk works.

Knock Off (1998)

This is my favorite Van Damme film. He plays a fashion designer who pals around with Rob Schneider in Hong Kong. They're both involved in counterfeiting apparel, leading to one of the weirdest pieces of product placement in cinema history: a subject point-of-view shot from inside a pair of fake "Pumma" shoes. It gets weirder. The CIA then blackmail our heroes into working with the agency to bring down the Russian mafia. You see, it turns out that the Russian mafia is using these counterfeit jeans or whatever to smuggle small bombs across the world. You would think there would be a better way, but not for these guys. For some reason, fashion designer/martial arts impresario Van Damme is virtually the only one the government trusts to stop these terrorists. Our national security rests with the big oaf. Van Damme is up to the challenge, however. I love this film. Sure, there's fewer martial arts in this one than in some of his other films, but watching the final rain-soaked shootout is like watching a ballet on the moon, complete with knee-slides. It doesn't make a lick of sense. I feel like I write this for most Van Damme films. Bless him.

Replicant (2001)

There's a whole subgenre of Van Damme films out there in which our favorite kickboxing poseur plays long-lost identical twins, or brothers, or past versions of himself, or clones of himself. This includes classic films like Double Impact, Timecop, Maximum Risk, and Replicant. In Replicant, definitely the best of the bunch, Van Damme plays both a serial killer and a clone created by the NSA from forensic evidence. It's assumed that the clone, fabricated from the serial killer's DNA, has some sort of psychic connection with the serial killer and can sense his presence or something. Goodness knows how exactly this happens, but it seems logical enough to the government. Since he's created in a lab, the clone is born with no prior experience and must learn how to walk, talk, interact and all that from scratch. In a fascinating montage, an adult Van Damme goes from crawling to doing his trademark splits in mere moments. Lots of conflicts follow: identities are mistaken, loyalties are questioned, sex is had, spin kicks are spun, you know. Van Damme gets plenty of philosophical mileage out of this whole "double" thing, and it culminates in a head-to-head fight between the original and the clone in a parking lot. This is the kind of action film I enjoy most; Replicant is both philosophically earnest and absolutely unafraid (or unaware) of its own stupidity. It's corny as all get-out, but it sure does try, and it's never boring. That's always nice.

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.

Double the Van Dammage: Double Impact (1991) and Double Team (1997)

I've watched a bunch of Jean-Claude Van Damme films recently. Who knows why. However, these are two of the best. Keep an eye out for more Van Damme double features in the future, because I haven't gotten sick of this guy yet.

Double Impact (1991)

Van Damme really stretches the acting muscles in this one by playing identical twins, separated since childhood because their parents were murdered by hoodlums in Hong Kong. This film firmly sides with nurture over nature, as the two children grow up to be way different: goober Chad runs a martial arts school in LA with his uncle and enjoys wooing the ladies with his small neon shirts, while Alex is a criminal living in Hong Kong, unwittingly working for the man who had his parents killed and going steady with his girlfriend, Danielle. Chad is duped by his uncle into traveling to the island to meet up with his long-lost brother, and from there a lot of weird things happen. Of course, Chad is mistaken for Alex and Alex is mistaken for Chad: such is life, and life is a constant struggle. This creates all manner of conflicts between the brothers and their Triad adversaries, not to mention Danielle, who takes quite a liking to Chad. This leads to two things: one is an absolutely disturbing love scene between Danielle and Chad, and the other is a fight between Chad and Alex, and it's not bad. In fact, Double Impact has more than a few decent fight scenes, including one between Alex and Moon, played by Bolo Yeung (you know him as the big guy in Bloodsport). The dopey comedy gets to be a bit much by the end, but it's a competent Van Damme vehicle with some so-so choreography. Not exactly fine dining, but still, satisfying nonetheless.

*I don't want to spoil this for you.

Double Team (1997)

This movie is 1997 through and through. It makes no sense at all. In another tale of unlikely partners, Van Damme plays Jack, an assassin, who meets up with an arms dealer, Yaz, played by Dennis Rodman. Yaz supplies Jack with weapons for his final mission. When Jack fails to eliminate the target, he is sent to an island for retired assassins, where they play golf and such. The island is heavily fortified and monitored, but Jack's pretty tough, so he manages to escape after a bit of training, mainly by doing curls with the bathtube tied around his neck. Once he finds his way back to society, Jack teams up with Yaz to rescue his wife, who has been kidnapped by the nefarious Stavros. Putting aside the weirdness of it all for a moment, this film has no sense of a proper dramatic arc. Jack's escape from the failed assassin's retirement home/prison feels like one film, and his quest for revenge against Stavros feels like another. This is not to say that I expect a delicate emotional narrative from a Van Damme movie, but even something as monumentally silly as Double Impact keeps a nice pace and pays everything off at the end. Double Team has so many ideas crammed into 90 minutes that they all get shortchanged as a result. However, Double Team has many redeeming qualities, including: Rodman's outfits, Rodman's dialogue, Van Damme's dialogue, that part where Van Damme spin-kicks a tiger, and product placement so blatant it almost seems subversive*. Van Damme's fight scenes are ruined by the convulsive editing, so I can't recommend Double Team on those grounds, but if you enjoy the absurd, this isn't terrible.