Enemies Closer (2013)

As I often say, this is one I'd been meaning to get to for sometime. It's been available on Freevee--which is the new name for IMDb TV--but I'd gotten so lazy that if it wasn't on Tubi or YouTube I wasn't bothering. Luckily it was on Tubi for a small window, in which I was able to make it happen. In addition to us, Ty and Brett at Comeuppance, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof, and RobotGEEK's Cult Cinema have all covered this.

Enemies Closer has DTVC Hall of Famer Jean-Claude Van Damme as Xander, a drug runner whose drugs are lost in a lake on the border of the US and Canada when the plane transporting them crashes. His plan is to get the park ranger, Tom Everett Scott, off the island so he can have his own diver go down and collect them, but when Scott is accosted by Orlando Jones, all bets are off. The issue for Van Damme is Scott is a former Navy SEAL, and after Van Damme's diver is killed in a shootout, he now needs to get Scott to get his drugs. It's a deadly game of cat and mouse, forcing Jones to get over his beef with Scott so the two can team up and hopefully survive the night and escape, while Van Damme just wants to get his drugs and leave.

This might be the biggest Destro Effect movie we've seen here at the DTVC. Van Damme is by far the most likeable person in the film, but not only that, he doesn't really kill anyone who doesn't deserve it. The first thing we see him do is take out a bunch of guys in an ICE facility on the US side of the border. ICE is understood to be one of the most sinister government agencies in the US, known for separating immigrant families, carrying out raids of local immigrant workers in conjunction with their employers like meat-packing plants to keep the workers from unionizing, and, probably most famously, putting kids in cages during the Trump Administration. So seeing Van Damme take them all out is an applause moment, not a show of how sinister he is. We also find out that Van Damme's character is environmentally aware and vegan. That's not bad, that's a really good thing! From there, Tom Everett Scott, who's already working uphill versus Van Damme in the natural charisma department, is further diminished as a hero when he spends half of the film getting frog-marched around by Orlando Jones's character, who himself isn't adding much to the proceedings. What happens is we have a fun movie with Van Damme, but there's the inevitability that we know Van Damme has to lose to Scott, and we don't want to see it happen. 

What's interesting is Van Damme might have two of the strongest instances of the Destro Effect, as we also saw it with his performance in The Expendables 2. Part of it is he plays such a likeable baddie in a way that he can't always do with his heroes; but also this baddie is very different from the one he played in The Expendables 2. In that film there was a sense that he felt Stallone was giving him the baddie role thinking it would be a lesser part, and he takes it and steals the entire film; while here, this was more he'd worked with Peter Hyams before, must've liked the character, and just took it and had fun with it. But also in this film, the writing and casting dictated that Van Damme's character would be the most enjoyable one to watch. How would we believe that Tom Everett Scott's character can take out Van Damme if he's having this much trouble with Orlando Jones? And while Van Damme is taking out ICE agents and doughy rednecks who are littering the lake, Scott is getting frog-marched around in the woods by some guy who shouldn't be his equal. This isn't Van Damme creating a Destro Effect by delivering a performance that takes over the film, this is a film that's complicit in allowing Van Damme to create the Destro Effect.

The term Destro Effect comes from me watching G.I. Joe growing up, and thinking Destro was the coolest, and being disappointed every time he lost to the heroes. It wasn't me wishing I was a bad guy or thinking doing bad things was better, it was the show creating a baddie who was so cool, his coolness wasn't mitigated by his bad deeds enough to make me root against him. You think of movies that played this right, Die Hard comes to mind, where Rickman is fantastic, but Willis is equally fantastic, and Rickman is killing innocent people to make us hope he loses. Christopher Plummer v. Thomas Ian Griffith in Crackerjack is another great example where we had a great baddie performance, but he was bad enough for it to work. Commando is one where the baddie was cool, but not anywhere near as cool as the hero. I went through the history of the site to find some other examples of the Destro Effect, and often it was a cool star as the baddie, like Dolph in The Package, or Lamas in Lethal. Most films take the easy way out now and just have the baddie be a human trafficker. No matter how cool a baddie is, we can't root for them if they're a human trafficker. Also killing innocent people is a great control on the Destro Effect. Ultimately the issue with the Destro Effect is we end up with an ending that's not fulfilling when we see the baddie we're rooting for lose, which is what we got here.

This was directed by Peter Hyams, who directed one of my favorite sports movies ever, Sudden Death, which also had Van Damme. According to the IMDb trivia, it was Hyams's idea to cast Van Damme in this and have him be the maniacal baddie. It would've been nice if, once that decision was made, they shot an alternate ending where Van Damme's baddie wins. I don't even know that we need him to kill off Scott either. I wonder if he caught what was happening with the Destro Effect as they were shooting. Going back to Sudden Death, Powers Booth is one of the best plural first-named baddies of all time, no Destro Effect there, we want to see Van Damme take him down and send that helicopter plunging through the roof of the arena. According to IMDb he hasn't directed anything since this, which, if I were him I wouldn't have directed anything after Sudden Death. That's a don that sombrero, hop on that donkey, and ride off into the sunset kind of movie. Considering what we know about Mel Gibson and Kevin Spacey now, we should go back and give Sudden Death the Oscar for best picture, best director for Hyams, and best supporting actor to Booth--sorry, I can't do Van Damme over Cage in Leaving Las Vegas though.

Finally, this is Van Damme's 32nd film here at the DTVC (he has 33 tags, but one was for the Van Damme Film Fest post), and by my count he has five more that would qualify for inclusion on the site, so unless he makes more movies, he'll cap out at 37, just shy of the 40 Club. Maybe that's okay for him though. When you look at his bio, unlike Seagal, Dolph, Adkins or some others who have these years where they do five or six films, Van Damme really doesn't have that--2012 is the only one, he had six that year--so the result is he can't rack up tags the way the others do. Reconnecting with Hyams here though reminds me of what Van Damme has meant to the world of action, that his 80s and 90s big screen career delivered some of the best and enduring classics. And in that way, despite this movie's shortcomings, it's good to see him still delivering fun performances like this.

With that let's wrap this up. As far as I know, Freevee is still the way to go to check this out. This is fun from the Van Damme standpoint, and while beyond that it misses in a lot of other ways, it's possible free to stream plus the fun Van Damme factor might be enough--still would've liked to have seen him win in the end though.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2395199

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