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.