Damage (2009)

This one kind of snuck by my radar, but our friend Sutekh over at Explosive Action brought it to my attention. We know I was less than stoked with The Stranger, seeing it as a lazy waste of an awesome Stone Cold Steve Austin, and was hoping for better things here. Let's see what happens.

Damage is part Hard Times (the Coburn/Bronson film, not the Dickens novel) part Lionheart, with Stone Cold Steve Austin as a parolee needing money to pay off the man he killed's daughter's heart transplant (in as contrived a situation possible, the wife gets him parolled and then implores him to get the money). He enters the underground fight game, but the weaselly dude who gets him in has all kinds of debts, so every time he thinks he has the cash, the weasel needs to pay off another crime boss. Anyway, that's pretty much it.



Wow, this hurt-- bad. To give you an idea how bad, instead of doing a montage of them going around to get backers for Austin's fights, they made us sit through every agonizingly poorly written scene of that, and then montaged some of the fights. Really? That's what I want to see, Stone Cold Steve Austin in a flannel coat and black knit cap, trying to be all stoic and deep and down-to-Earth, talking to crime bosses. And the fight scenes weren't great either. Trading overly bloody punches is cool here and there, but I need something different, especially when I remember how well Stone Cold could fight in the WWE. Where are his wrestling moves? Punching a guy in the chest is a finishing blow? Are you serious? Three words: Stone Cold Stunner. There were a few good fights, a few good lines, and it looked like it had some promise in the beginning, but the people making it thought they could write stimulating dialog and could get away with boring us to death with minimal action, and that if they made it gratuitously bloody, we'd forget all of that. No dice. They needed to simplify this plot, cut out a lot of the crap, and ramp up the action.

This should in no way be an indictment on Stone Cold Steve Austin. I loved him in the WWE, and if anyone has the charisma, size, screen presence, and fighting ability to follow in the footsteps of DTV greats like Dolph and Seagal, it's definitely him. The Stranger was a little bit closer, in that at least they had some tongue-in-cheek moments like Austin speaking Spanish and destroying some Federales with a wooden chair so they couldn't torture him with the tools of ancient dentistry. This film, Damage, could have really worked. It worked with Hard Times, it worked with Lionheart, and it worked with Blood and Bone. But all of those films didn't forget who they were, or what kind of film they were making. You're not Jim Jarmusch, and Stone Cold Steve Austin isn't John Lurie or Tom Waits, and we're good with that. Minimize the backstory, make it less convoluted, and get after it in the fight scenes. And I'm not talking UFC-esque brawls. The UFC works in real life because it's real, but in a movie, the fighting has to be more theatrical. We need more Stone Cold and less Steve Austin. The guy can carry an action film, he just needs to be allowed to do it, and he wasn't here.



This movie had two interesting, yet conflicting messages. There was one that was an indictment of the health insurance industry, because the girl needs $250,000 for a heart transplant-- though part of me wonders if that was an indictment, or rather something celebrated, that we don't just hand out heart transplants, you gotta earn that shit, not like in those pansy socialist European countries with their socialized medicine. Anyway, the second message, was much more irresponsible. They give a horribly inaccurate depiction of the parole system, painting it as derelict and unconcerned with what parolees were doing, meaning they could be out committing more crimes. This myth that parole is bad for society, and that it needs to be abolished, is a very dangerous one. Parole, when done as it's intended, is a much preferable way to releasing criminals back into society and keeping tabs on them, than just letting them free when their sentence is done. People misunderstand when a judge sentences someone with parole as an option, erroneously thinking they're being let out early, as opposed to using parole as an incentive to behave in prison; and by painting the parole system as one that couldn't care less what parolees are doing, when that's not always the case, it makes people more likely to support politicians who run on a "tough on crime" platform, when the truth is, they're voting for the opposite, because judges lose the tool of parole as an incentive for prisoners to reform in prison.

The brightest spot in Damage was the always hot Laura Vandervoort. I liked her better in Into the Blue 2: The Reef, where she had blond hair, but beggars can't be choosers. The thing with her is, she always has a look on her face that's very intelligent and understanding of what's happening around her, which worked out well in Into the Blue 2, because it fit her character, but in Damage, she had a few moments when her character wasn't supposed to be so smart or with it, but that look betrayed that element, and made it unnatural. That's one aspect of Into the Blue I liked better than Damage, the people who made that one weren't afraid to cast someone as hot as Vendervoort as the intelligent lead who figures things out and is a step ahead of everyone. Damage easily could've dumped the weasel guy, and had her play Austin's handler and get rid of the cheap rocker girl outfits-- hell they could've even made her a bad guy like Eamonn Walker in Blood and Bone. It just showed again how pedestrian this film was, and I love pedestrian when amps up the action, but I can't forgive it when it bores us to tears.



I want to use this seventh paragraph to discuss a trend in recent DTV actioners that's slightly disconcerting: the move to more realistic UFC style fights instead of the theatrical martial arts filled ones we're used to seeing. I get that Austin probably doesn't know a lot of martial arts beyond wrestling, but what he does know is how to fight in a way that's entertaining. There's a reason why Hong Kong cinema works, it's pleasing on the eye. Sure, it might be ludicrous that one dude could kick the crap out of twenty baddies, but it's just a ludicrous that anyone could take the kinds of punishment demonstrated in these UFC style fighting movies and stay standing. The difference is, one looks awesome, and one looks clunky and hard to watch. Stone Cold Steve Austin trading punches and getting stitches sewn into his face by Laura Vandervoort is not as cool as Stone Cold Steve Austin riding in on his Harley, throwing a bunch of stuntmen around like Armor King in Tekken, and then having beers tossed to him from off camera.

All right, for a movie that hurt, I wrote plenty on it, so I better wrap it up here. I have faith that someone sometime will finally get it right with Mr. Austin. He's just too good to be wallowing in these lackluster films that don't properly utilize his talent, and Damage was certainly one of those.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1314177/