We Die Young (2019)

This is one we covered on the podcast with Sean Malloy of I Must Break This Podcast, back on episode 246, and with Van Damme so close to the 40 Club, I figured we had to make it happen here too. In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof, Outlaw Vern, and even Simon Abrams for Roger Ebert have covered this as well.

We Die Young is about a young man named Lucas (Elijah Rodriguez), who makes collections and deals drugs for MS-13 gang leader Rincon (David Castaneda). One of the people he deals to is Daniel (Van Damme) an Afghan War vet whose vocal chords were damaged in the war, and who takes oxys to dull the pain and help with his PTSD. All is going well, until Lucas discovers his 10-year-old brother is being jumped into the gang, and he can't have that. The problem is, he was supposed to deliver some bricks of cash to someone for Rincon, and now that he hasn't done that, the people who were supposed to get said cash are coming for Rincon, who in turn is coming for Lucas. Maybe this Afghan War vet can help.

This has its moments. One, Van Damme turns in another nice performance, and Castaneda was solid too. Also Elijah Rodriguez, whose Lucas character is the center of everything, does a great job making that work. On the other hand, there were some issues, the biggest is the unevenness with Van Damme's character in the story. It felt like maybe his character wasn't meant to be in the movie at all, but when producer Moshe Diamant, who has a long history with Van Damme, found out he could get him for this, they added the part in in order to make that happen. It makes sense, because I wouldn't be watching or reviewing this for the site without Van Damme, let alone include it on a podcast episode, but as I said, it makes the whole thing uneven, as there are elements of Van Damme's character that aren't developed as well, but also we don't know if he's the hero, or Rodriguez. The other thing is, the whole MS-13 thing feels like bad Latin American scare mongering, which in 2019 would've fit in with the rest of the anti-immigrant slander in the US, and great performances by Castaneda and Rodriguez weren't able to overcome that. Finally, we come to a Van Damme film for the action, and while we did get some here, there was also a lot of shaky cam that disrupted it. For me, this is really for Van Damme completists only, but I would watch some of his others first before you get to this one.

Speaking of Van Damme, this is his 37th film on the site. Yes, it's his 38th tag, but one of those was for the 400th post, which was the Van Damme film fest, so it doesn't count as a movie. Based on that, we could get him into the 40 Club if we do The Gardiner along with Swelter and Welcome to the Jungle. He also has some things in production that could get us there. The 40 Club is a big deal, especially for someone like him who also had a large big screen career. And unlike Seagal, who's been stuck on 39 since 2019, and whose movies are mostly all the same, Van Damme has tried a lot of different things, and this movie is testament to that. I think that's what interested him in the project, beyond wanting to do Moshe Diamant a solid, and it does show in his performance, it's just that we lose him for big chunks because we'll following Rodriguez's character and what he's up to. Either way, I do think the fact that Van Damme has been taking projects like this should be applauded.

David Castaneda does a solid job here, taking what was a standard gangster role, that was attempted to be written with nuance, but was pretty one-note, and imbuing it with his own nuance. In 2019 he would also start on The Umbrella Academy, which took his career to another level, and he was able to leave these kinds of movies behind--at least for now anyway. For as solid an actor as he is, it's interesting that one area he's been inhabiting is the bigger name who gets killed off in the first act, as this happens to him in both The Ballerina and Trap House. Hopefully soon he'll get more parts that let him last longer into the movie! It's always cool in the DTV world to get a name like this just before they get bigger, and it brings an added element to watching them beyond the film's main star.

We often talk about how New York City is a character in itself in a film, and while I don't know if Washington, DC is quite at that level, it is a pretty recognizable city, especially when a set in Bulgaria is supposed to pass for it. Then the comment Lucas makes about how the area they lived in was only 20 minutes from the White House, it made it sound like Lior Geller, the writer and director, hadn't really been to DC before. It was like when the Bush 41 Administration set up a fake crack buy across from the White House in 1989, the guy they got to sell them the drugs had no idea where the White House was or where they wanted him to meet them, the "20 minutes from the White House" was more of the film's anti-Latin American propaganda, like "these evil illegal immigrant gangs are only 20 minutes from the White House!" Beyond the bad propaganda aspect, it just all plays goofy to have what is clearly a studio set in Bulgaria that looks nothing like any part of DC trying to be passed off as DC. My advice to low-budget filmmakers: if you can't shoot there, just make up place and set the film there instead. We'll be more accepting of that than this.

Finally, the film's title for some reason or other gets The Power Station's "We Fight for Love" aka "Someday, Somehow, Someone's Gotta Pay" in my head. Every time I saw it, I thought "we die for young..." which doesn't make any sense, but I guess that's how I think about things musically. I was trying to think from a soundtrack standpoint how many songs are better than that one. It's the punctuation mark on one of the greatest films of all time. I found out this song came after Robert Palmer left the group and was replaced by Michael Des Barres, which is why the vocals are different from things like "Some Like It Hot" and "Get It On." I don't know if it would've been better with Palmer's vocals, but there was a period when they reformed with the original line-up in 1996, which makes me curious to know if Palmer performed this live, or if he insisted on no Des Barres songs while they toured. 

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can get this on Plex here in the States, but it's kind of an odd one because it comes and goes on Tubi too, so you may see it on there again at some point. As I said above, I think this is for Van Damme completists only, but I think those Van Damme fans will find something in his performance. Also, check out the podcast episode Sean and I did on this one, number 246 in the archives.

For more information: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7903530

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Kill 'Em All 2 (2024)

This is one we covered on the podcast, along with the first movie, back in episode 199, with guest Sean Malloy of I Must Break This Podcast. The plan was to review it here soon after, but when my wife and I dialed down our Netflix subscription to the ad version, I discovered that many titles, including this one, were now gated and unavailable to subscribers at our tier. So that was it, if I couldn't stream it I couldn't get screens, until recently, when Netflix released all of these movies, giving me this opportunity. In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof Action has covered this as well.

Kill 'Em All 2 picks up some years after part one left off. Phillip (Van Damme) and his daughter Vanessa (Jacqueline Fernandez) are living in Italy, having a relaxing time, when the brother of the guy he killed in the first one (Andrei Lenart) finds them and tries to exact revenge. Unable to take them on alone, Phillip and Vanessa go back to his extended family for help. It'll take everything they have to take this baddie down, and eventually, kill 'em all.

There are two places we should go with this. First, why do we have this film, especially 7 years later? No one was clamoring for a Kill 'Em All 2, and I don't remember leaving Kill 'Em All thinking this is setting up for a sequel. And it isn't like this was made as something else and repackaged as Kill 'Em All 2 to capitalize on the name--which, again, why is Kill 'Em All a name we're capitalizing on? This story was a continuation of the previous one, with characters returning to reprise their roles, including Peter Stomare and Maria Conchita Alonso (who, in her case, really only has a scene or two). So that's the first question, why do we even have this? But we do, and I'm writing a review on it, so the second place to go is, is it any good? For that I would say yeah, it's not bad, at least if we're grading it on the 2020s-level DTV action curve. And that's probably where it's found success on Netflix. Their algorithm is great at suggesting things to people, and the people the algorithm suggested it to liked it because it's not bad for a 2020s DTV actioner. So maybe we didn't need this and don't know why we have it, but we do, and while it's not a world-changer, it's not bad either, and worth a look if you're a Van Damme fan and curious about what he's been up to recently.

Speaking of Van Damme, I wonder what he thought when he was approached with the idea of a sequel to Kill 'Em All. I can't imagine that alone sold him, but maybe a week or two shooting on the Adriatic coast of Italy sealed the deal. (I mean, forget the Adriatic coast in Italy, I would take an all expenses paid trip to Des Moines or Boise or Wichita or something like that to write this blog and record the podcast--not to knock any of those places, I'm sure they're lovely, and if the chambers of commerce or tourism bureaus of those cities or any others in America want me to spend a week there and extoll their virtues, just send me an email, I'm just saying compared to the Adriatic coast of Italy, they'd be a bit wanting, which I think is fair.) In terms of recent Van Damme, it's a bit more action than drama, which is nice, but it's also more of the more mature Van Damme, where he's okay that his leading lady is his daughter and not his love interest. I appreciate that, and I think it makes the movie itself less unseemly, which makes any flaws it might have more forgivable. We're now at 36 movies for Van Damme (he has 37 tags because one is the Van Damme Film Fest for post 400), so if we do The Gardiner, with the three other DTV films of his we need to do, the 40 Club is in range. Maybe we make that happen this year?

As we mentioned above, Jacqueline Fernandez plays Van Damme's character's daughter. She's a Bollywood actor who, as far as I can tell, hasn't done anything else outside of that market other than this film. I wonder if that was the idea though, see if people who are fans of her Bollywood work might stream this the ways fans of Van Damme's career would, and with Netflix having a lot of Bollywood films, it would be easy for the algorithm to push this to people who are watching her other movies on there--and again, maybe for her the draw is shooting on the beautiful Adriatic coast of Italy, which, like Van Damme, I don't blame her. She was value-add here though, I thought she and Van Damme were good together as father and daughter, which is what you need if you're selling this to action fans as a fun 90-minute stream. With how successful this film was on Netflix, maybe they'll be looking to cast her in more movies like this, or other Bollywood stars to cash in on this crossover effect. I'm all for it, it gets someone like me digging through Bollywood films on IMDb bios, which puts them on my radar, and maybe it gets Bollywood fans doing the same thing with these DTV actioners.

The DTV sequel is a multifaceted phenomenon that we've seen in its many iterations myriad times on the site since we started in 2007. The one people most think of is the DTV sequel to the theatrical film, which can turn a one-off into a franchise. Van Damme's had two films in particular do this, Kickboxer and Bloodsport, which both had a series of DTV sequels that didn't have him in them at all; he's also done DTV sequels of his own theatrical movies too, like the Universal Soldier films. There's also the sequel-in-name-only sequel, the best example of which is the Bloodfist films, where Corman got the crazy Grinchy idea while shooting a prison film with Don "The Dragon" Wilson to just rename it Bloodfist III, even if the only connection to the first two Bloodfist films was Wilson, and led to five more "sequels" after that. Another one is the Superman/Superman II approach, where, like those two films, you get the actors in one location, and shoot two or three films all at once. A great example of this is the two Randall Scandal Fortress movies. Adjacent to that is what I call the Godfrey Ho sequel, where footage of the first film is spliced with newly shot footage, or other archival footage. Two great examples of that are Detective Malone, the fourth Black Cobra film, which is just footage of the first two cobbled together; and Gladiator Cop aka The Swordsman II, where new footage with James Hong was spliced with old footage of Lorenzo Lamas from The Swordsman. And then we have where this one falls, the who-was-asking-for-this? sequel. Speaking of Lamas, you could make a case that the Snake Eater films fall into this category. Another would be the Relentless films. I mean, I love Leo Rossi, but who was clamoring for two Relentless films, let alone four? Now some of this might dovetail with the sequel-in-name-only sequel, where a studio gets a script and thinks "what if we rework this into a sequel for another movie we already have out there?", because the name recognition, however scant it may be, does exist on some level; on the other hand, it can be a double-edged sword, because people may think they need to find the first one to understand what's happening in the new one. It's always a gamble in the DTV world, and whether to make a film a sequel or not is part of that. I'll finish this long paragraph by mentioning the late Daniel Zirilli, who seemed to always leave the door open for a sequel at the ends of his movies. There weren't many who understood the DTV market better than him, and I think this was another example.

Finally, I thought I'd dedicate a second paragraph to Van Damme, even if this might be stealing the thunder of a potential 40 Club post later this year. The fact that he's closing in on that milestone, on top of the great career he had as a big screen action star, is something unique that I think is worth drawing attention to. I can only think of two other people who would be in this category, Seagal and Spiro Razatos. With Seagal, his big screen career, at least for me, is weighted heavily on his first four films, and I don't know that anything after Under Siege I'd put in an all-time classics category--and for me Under Siege wouldn't go in that category either. Compare that to Van Damme, whose 90s stuff includes Hard Target, Timecop, and Sudden Death. And then compare their DTV/post-big screen careers, where Seagal became more and more of a punchline, while Van Damme has stuff like JCVD and The Bouncer. Razatos is a different one, because he was DTV first, then became the foremost stunt coordinator/second unit director of the 2010s. Also, we're only at 27 movies for Razatos, so we have a ways to go to get him to the 40 Club. It just goes to highlight the great career Van Damme has had, and while it hasn't been without its ups and downs, this DTV second act in particular has been much better than it needed to be, and he deserves a lot of credit for making it that great.

And with that we'll wrap this up. This is currently on Netflix, though it may or may not be gated based on your plan. I think if you can get it as part of your Netflix subscription, it's worth checking out, especially if you're a Van Damme fan. And don't forget to check out the podcast episode Sean and I did on this and the first film, number 199 in the archives.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6549510

And check out my newest novel, Mark in Sales, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Darkness of Man (2024)

This is one we covered on the podcast, episode 194 in the archives, with Sean Malloy from "I Must Break This Podcast," and with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Cynthia Rothrock, we had to get it on the site eventually too, so we're making it happen now. In addition to us, Chris the Brain at Bulletproof Action has covered this as well.

Darkness of Man has Van Damme as Russell Hatch, an Interpol agent who was supposed to be protecting a witness, but when she's killed, he agrees to protect her son. Years later, said son is now a teenager, and said son doesn't get along well with either the grandfather who's taking care of him, or Van Damme, who acts as the guy driving him to school while living in an extended stay hotel. At the same time, the kid's uncle runs an organized crime ring, which is going up against the Russians in an all-out turf war. Will the son get caught in the middle? And if so, will Van Damme be able to protect them? Is this his chance at redemption after failing to protect the mother all those years ago? Oh, and isn't Cynthia Rothrock in this film?

When Sean and I were looking at Van Damme movies to cover, it was between this one and the two Kill 'Em All films, and Sean said he needed to do this one first because he'd already seen it, and wanted to cover it while it was still fresh in his mind so he didn't have to watch it again. And that pretty much sums this one up, it's a rough sit, and you don't want to put yourself through it again. Why? First off, it's long, 107 minutes. Second, we have a lot of moving parts, and to try and sort them all out, we have Van Damme's voice-overs. Third, there are random things that feel like they were grafted into the movie, like the fact that Kristanna Loken's character is a veterinarian. Finally, we have a lot of moments where not a lot happens. It's a recipe for a tough sit. There are some bright spots though. We have some fun Van Damme fights, and director James Cullen Bressack went for some old Film Noir tones, that, when combined with the cinematography of Pascal Combes-Knoke led to some inspired shot composition; and I think something does need to be said for filmmakers and stars trying to do something outside the usual DTV fare, so I don't want to dump on this completely, it just missed for me overall.

We're now at 35 films for Van Damme, even though he has 36 tags, because our 400th post was a Van Damme film fest, so it doesn't count for inclusion in the 40 Club. At 35, could he get there? In the hopper we still have Kill 'Em All, and then for DTV stuff left to watch, there's Swelter, Welcome to the Jungle, and We Die Young. That's 39, and depending on how we feel about The Gardiner, he could get there. As much as this movie didn't work, the thing I appreciated was how present Van Damme was, and how much he was trying to stretch himself and try something different. The fact that he's still doing that at this stage in his career, when he really doesn't have to--he could just be in the movie and cash the check--is refreshing, and is the reason why I'm still going to keep watching his stuff. (Though to be fair, Seagal is the exact opposite of Van Damme, and I still watch all of his stuff too.)

Cynthia Rothrock has a one-scene cameo, but a one-scene cameo is enough to get another tag, which puts her at 44. I don't even really know what she's doing here, she's the nurse checking in on Van Damme after he survived a shooting, and that's it. She doesn't even share the screen with Van Damme, who knows who she's even speaking to when they shot her lines. I thought when this first came out that she was higher billed on IMDb, but now I don't see her on the first page, so either I was wrong, or something changed and they shuffled the cast names to make her less prominent. It brings up an interesting concept in the world of IMDb, using listings on an actor's bio to sell a movie. Even if she's not on the first page of the movie's listing, when you go to Rothrock's bio, this is the fourth film from the top, and the only one of those four that's not rent VOD. If you click on it, and see it also has Jean-Claude Van Damme, and it's on Hulu, why wouldn't you want to see what that's about? And then you get this tough sit of a movie that doesn't know exactly what it wants to be, and Rothrock only has this one scene where she doesn't even fight at all. By then it's too late, Hulu and the movie got their stream, and you've been had. Will IMDb bait-and-switches become more prominent as we go on? We do have a couple movies in the hopper where she had bigger roles than this, The Last Kumite and Taken from Rio Bravo, so we'll be seeing more of her soon. Unless you're a completist like me, this isn't worth it if you're a fan of hers.

There are a bunch of other names in this, all playing parts of varying degrees. We mentioned Kristanna Loken above. She's the only other one who's tagged--still as "Painkiller Jane," because I haven't had the energy to retag her, even though this is only her sixth film on the site, so it wouldn't take that much work. It's crazy to think Painkiller Jane was still airing when we started the DTVC, it's been that long. We also had a couple James Cullen Bressack mainstays in Zack Ward, Scut Farkus from A Christmas Story, and Kristos Andrews. They play Russian mobsters here, and small, supporting roles. Then there were some nepo babies, with Weston Cage, and Van Damme's two sons Kris and Nicolas. Then we had MMA star Nick Diaz, former child star Spencer Breslin, and hip hop star Sticky Fingaz. I thought that was everyone, but totally forgot that Eric Roberts is in one shot where he orders a taco from a food truck. Your guess is as good as mine, but he was there.

One name I didn't mention, because I'm saving it for this paragraph, was the late Shannen Doherty. A 90s icon who grew to prominence with Beverly Hills 90210, then received a bad--and probably undeserved--reputation as being difficult to work with when she left that show. Soon she had two movies that were going to be her Hollywood breakouts: Blindfold: Acts of Obsession, which ended up going directly to the USA Network here in the US instead of getting a theatrical release; and Mallrats, Kevin Smith's follow-up to Clerks that wasn't as well-received, though I think people my age really loved it. Eventually she got on another TV show, Charmed, but that ended in more on-set strife, and from there she bounced around from TV movie to TV movie, which is where she ended up in the orbit of James Cullen Bressack, who cast her in a bunch of his films, with this one unfortunately being her last. I think one of the most enduring parts of her legacy is that when we think of 90210, we think of her, even though she was only on 111 of the show's 292 episodes, because she played such a compelling character, and they never really replaced her. Here's to you Ms. Doherty, you were one of the greats, and you'll be missed.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Hulu here in the States. As I said above, it's a bit of a tough sit, and with barely any Rothrock too. Proceed at your own peril. And if you haven't yet, check out the podcast episode we did on this, number 194 in the archives.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt23173980

And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Alien Uprising aka UFO (2012)

This is one that's been sitting in my Tubi queue for a while now. It's got Van Damme, so I knew I needed to do it at some point; but it also didn't look that great, none of the other big low-budget action sites had covered it, and it was over 100 minutes long. But then Tubi was about to get rid of it, so I figured I'd better make it happen.

Alien Uprising has a group of young people in Derby who go out to a night club and get into some trouble. One of the group is Pierce Brosnan's son Sean, and he meets Jean-Claude Van Damme's daughter Bianca, and the two hook up. The next day, the power's out, and things seem weird. No one thinks too much of it, until the next day a massive UFO is resting in the sky. Now all hell breaks loose, as people are scrambling to get supplies and fighting with each other, while the army is confronting the aliens. Somehow Jean-Claude Van Damme figures in as well. Will the kids make it out alive?

And do we care? Kind of, maybe. There was one character I cared about, so I guess that's something. There was a lot sauteed in wrong sauce here though. First, most of these kids aren't worth caring about, and the movie wrote them that way, so I wasn't sure why I was following them. We also could've trimmed a good 20 minutes off the beginning and been okay. The club scene went on too long, the sex scene went on too long, the next morning stuff went on too long. There was a fight scene between Sean Brosnan and another guy that was also too long, but not only that, chock full of interspersed slo-mo. Like Brosnan kicks a guy in the head, and for some reason they decided to slow that down, only to speed it up right after. Was it that cool of an effect? Finally, the worst part--spoiler alert--everyone dies at the end. If everyone dies at the end, what's the point? Why put everyone through this if you're just going to kill them all off? We did have some moments of legitimate tension, which I think would've had more punch if this was tighter. I guess this is for Van Damme completists only, which is what I am, so if you have a review site and need to get all of Van Damme's stuff reviewed, it's worth it for that.

This is now 34 films for Van Damme on the site. (He has 35 tags, but one is for Post 400, the Van Damme Film Fest.) Can we get him to the 40 Club? Based on my math, we have his newest one, Darkness of Man, and then three others from the 2010s, which gets us to 38, plus he has some stuff in pre-production, so we might get there--though we know from The Eagle Path what can happen with those pre-production movies: nothing. He has a very small part in this, where he comes in at the very end as a former military guy who knows what's happening with the aliens. He sticks around long enough to have a fight scene with his daughter--so he's now had them with two of his kids, after having them in multiple films with his son Kris--then gets blown up by a laser from an alien ship. Again, it's just about being a Van Damme completist, and now I can officially say I've seen this and reviewed it.

Speaking of Bianca Van Damme (credited as Bianca Bree here), I didn't realize that this is her fifth film on the site. (If you're curious, Kris has nine so far.) As I mentioned above, she has a fight scene with her father, and based on her bio, she's trained in martial arts, so she may not have been doubled as much as I thought. Based on her skills and action star lineage, she could have a solid DTV action career, not just in low-budget stuff like this, but those higher-budget things that get picked up by Netflix or end up on Hulu after a short rental window on Amazon. Olga Kurylenko would be a good comp, but again, being able to put the name "Van Damme" on the tin would be a bigger selling point. You could also see lesser roles in big screen films the way Scott Adkins and Daniel Bernhardt have done, like a one-off baddie in that new John Wick film The Ballerina. Imagine if that happened, and Van Damme had to ask his daughter to get him on set instead of the other way around?

I mentioned above that we also had Pierce Brosnan's son in this, but I didn't realize that when I was grabbing images, I thought he was just your run of the mill 2010s bro dinkus type, until I started writing the review and saw who he was, and by then I'd missed my window to grab the images on Tubi. Throughout the movie I was trying to figure out what he looked like, beyond the 2010s bro dinkus type, and when I saw his picture on IMDb it clicked: lead singer of a third-tier 80s British pop act. And maybe not even an actual Brit, but like a Scandinavian or Northern European playing in the third-tier pop act. I wish the filmmakers had had the sense to let him run with that instead, just said "give us full lead singer of A-ha or Nik Kershaw. Just pretend I'm Russell Mulcahy and we're filming your latest video." That was the energy this film needed, and even though it wouldn't have gotten us over the goal line, it would've helped.

Finally, this film was shot in Derby in the UK. Not a place I've ever been to--unless the tour bus I took on my high school trip to the UK went through there between Stratford-upon-Avon and York, but I wouldn't have even known--but I do have an interesting connection to there. At the Goodwill here in South Philly, I found a Derby County scarf. I've probably mentioned before on the site that I'm an Arsenal fan, which started in the mid-90s after the World Cup was here in the States and I became a world football fan, I really liked Dennis Bergkamp, and when I found out he played for Arsenal, that became my team. Anyway, all I really know about Derby is from their Premier League season when they had like 9 points, which might explain why the scarf ended up at Goodwill, South Philly's lone Derby County fan was so disgusted, they donated the scarf, and it sat there for ten years, in among more fashionable women's scarves because the people who worked at the Goodwill didn't know where else to put it, and where it was ignored, until I was there with my wife and happened to see it while she was looking through that section. Had I known going in that this was shot in Derby, I would've dusted it off for the occasion. I saw that they're back in the Championship for next season, and I think those games are on ESPN+ here in the States, so that'll give me a team to root for if I follow it at all.

And with that, let's wrap this up. It looks like this is still available on Freevee, so that may be a way to make it happen. For me, this is strictly for Van Damme completists, and only the hardest of the hardcore of them at that.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2040578/

And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.

The Last Mercenary aka Le dernier mercenaire (2021)

When I saw this was on Netflix, I really wanted to check it out... and then I saw the almost two-hour runtime. Ouch! But it's Van Damme, and unlike his fellow action stars, he doesn't put out as much anymore, so if he has a movie out and it's direct to Netflix, I should give it a look, despite a possible tough sit. In addition to us, Chris at Bulletproof Action has covered this as well.

The Last Mercenary has Van Damme as a former agent for the French government who, on his last mission, requests that his son get immunity from any crimes and money from the government as payment for Van Damme's service to his country. Unfortunately, many years later, a drug kingpin who likens himself to Tony Montana in Scarface has gained access to Van Damme's son's immunity, and has been using it to commit crimes. Even that wouldn't have been an issue, until a government worker decides to revoke the immunity and the son is falsely accused of the kingpin's crimes. This means our man, Mr. Van Damme, needs to come out of retirement to clear his son's name. But will that estranged son who's never met his father welcome said father's help?

This was fun for me. It felt like a 90s Van Damme blockbuster in the tone and action. It is a French film, and while we have a dubbed option on Netflix, I opted for the French with English subtitles. The fact that you can go either way is nice, as you don't always have that option with streamers. The Van Damme we get is invested and having fun, and the characters around him were great too. There were moments where the humor was a bit much, like when the goofy government worker who initially revoked Van Damme's son's immunity needs to go back to his job, but can't tell anyone he's been working with Van Damme, so Van Damme punches him in the neck, which causes his face to swell up so he can't talk. I think for my sensibilities, I could've done with about 50% of those jokes, but the nostalgia factor of seeing Van Damme in something like this again mitigated that a lot for me, and I was able to overlook it. Rounding out the cast, I was a big fan of Assa Sylla as Dalila, Van Damme's son's friend. I also liked, among the many great performances, Samir Decazza as his son, Alban Ivanov as the worker who revokes the immunity, Eric Judor as the government worker helping the kingpin, and Miou-Miou as Marguerite, Van Damme's old friend. I think if the runtime, the French language, and the French humor are okay with you, you'll have fun seeing Van Damme in something reminiscent of his 90s heyday. 

Van Damme is a big reason why this works, and I think to see someone at this stage in his career looking for projects he can sink his teeth into as opposed to cashing in on as many short roles as he can, is refreshing. He's also playing older characters, especially in this film and The Bouncer--which was also another film where he spoke in his native French. The fact that he's more selective means he probably won't get the tags to make the 40 Club or higher, but I think this might be a case where quality trumps quantity. This is movie number 33 for him, and we have, by my count, 4 more that we could review here, but we could potentially tack on a couple of his big screen roles like we did with The Expendables to get him over the finish line. In a way, we're already doing that by covering this film, because it's only technically DTV because it was released on Netflix here in the States. Plus, with all the different disguises he had in this, I couldn't not review this and miss the chance to post some of these screens!

Speaking of which, Netflix, and with it Hulu, Prime, and other streamers, have started releasing content that pushes the idea of what's DTV. Big names, big budgets, sometimes limited theatrical releases so they qualify for award season, this isn't the Italian shot in the Philippines exploding hut flick or PM vehicle flip every 10 minutes actioner DTV of the 80s and 90s. In a case like this, where we have a DTVC Hall of Famer like Van Damme, it's an obvious choice, but looking at movies like Prey or Pig, I want to cover them--and in the case of Pig, I've dedicated a podcast episode with Mitch from The Video Vacuum to it--but do they get away from the essence of what this site is all about? One idea I had was to fit those films in on some of my Tuesday off-podcast posts. In the past I did Friday Wild Card posts where I covered all kinds of films like Showgirls and Batman and Robin, so there has been some precedent for that. It is an amazing thing to see how DTV and streaming has grown since the site started 15 years ago. In 2007, Netflix was just barely rolling out their instant service, and I got a Roku, only to see the app freeze constantly. They upgraded it soon after, but the content was mostly DTV stuff and old TV shows, making it great for me and the site; but sometime after that, they released Arrested Development, and their original programming was born, which has totally changed everything. Now it's up to us to see how we're going to move with that change.

And to see how Van Damme has moved through that period as well has been interesting. In the late 2000s he was doing a lot of standard DTV clunkers with the occasional bright spot, then he does JCVD, and follows it up with his film-stealing performance as the baddie in Expendables 2. In the 2010s he went back to the DTV well, but it wasn't like those 2000s films, and now he's here in this Netflix original, recreating that 90s big budget glory in a French production. Maybe a good comp is Dolph, but Dolph never quite had the highs Van Damme did, and his come back in the late 2010s with films like Aquaman and Creed has a different feel--a "Dolph-aissance" as Mitch from the Video Vacuum termed it, a rebirth that has him getting big screen roles again. Van Damme on the other hand hasn't had a rebirth, so much as he's taking this later stage of his career on his terms. Whether it's big or not, they're the movies he wants to make. It's a shame that Black Water didn't turn out well with the two of them, but maybe it couldn't turn out well, because they're going on divergent paths that didn't need to cross--or rather the better crossing was Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning--but seeing them individually have these great performances in the late 2010s/early 2020s has been fun to see.

Finally, as you know if you've been following the site, I'm a huge baseball fan, and while I'm a Red Sox fan, meaning I'm contractually obligated to hate the Yankees, I loved seeing this '47 Brand Yankees cap on Van Damme in this scene. I can't tell for sure, but that looks like my favorite '47 style, the Clean Up. At one time I had an idea that I'd get one for every team whose ballpark I saw a game at (which sits at 10 as of this writing), but I realized it was kind of a waste of money, because the only hat I ever wear around here is my Phillies one, and then when I go back to New England, I wear a Portland Sea Dogs one. T-shirts are probably better, but even then, how many do I need to have from different teams? And some of those shirts are over $30, that's the price of ticket to another game! I'm also realizing that I'm such a baseball geek that I spent the better part of this paragraph talking about Van Damme's Yankees cap, when he's also sporting that too sweet mustache. Add in the shirt and glasses, and he'd be fantastic as a cameo in a Coen Brothers film playing a driving instructor, which is what he's doing in this scene. But I also still love the hat...

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently stream this on Netflix. At an hour and 50 minutes, either in French or dubbed in English, it might feel like a bit much, and I get that, especially when you factor in the French style of humor; but the feel of this, bringing me back to the 90s Van Damme blockbuster, made it worth it for me.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12808182

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, Holtman Arms, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

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

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Kill 'Em All (2017)

I saw this was free on Tubi, and I had to make it happen. For a while, a lot of Van Damme's DTV stuff was harder to get on free streaming services, so I wanted to take advantage of a time when one like this was. Now it looks like a lot of them, including this one, are available again, so the rush to make it happen may not have been warranted, but you never know with streaming services, and at least it's been watched, so now I'm reviewing it. In addition to us, our friends at Bulletproof Action have covered this, so you can go there to see what they thought.

Kill 'Em All has Van Damme as a mysterious man who we find on the verge of death, probably having gone through a horrible ordeal. We also have Autumn Reeser as an emergency room nurse being interrogated by the FBI about a shootout that happened at her hospital. What does she know about this mysterious Van Damme guy in black? As she tells them what she knows, we get to see the film in flashbacks--her flashbacks, but flashbacks nonetheless. What is this Van Damme guy up to? What are his motives? What do the Serbian mafia have to do with it all? I guess we need to sit back for 90 minutes and wait to find out.

 

This is one of those ones that isn't horrible, but the storytelling device I mentioned above gets in the way a bit. I liked what they were trying to do, but from a movie standpoint, I always find that jumping back and forth to be disruptive. Beyond that, there was a great cast: beyond Van Damme and Reeser, we had DTVC favorite Daniel Bernhardt; big picture stalwarts Peter Stormare and Maria Conchita Alonso; and someone we haven't seen since we reviewed 2002's painfest Whacked! in 2008, Paul Sampson. On top of that, the action is pretty good, but we're also saddled with this construct of Van Damme's character having a concussion that, like the classic leg wound, is an issue when it is, but isn't when it isn't, if you know what I mean. By 2017's DTV standards, this isn't bad, and if you're a Van Damme fan, a free stream isn't a bad deal to make it happen.

Mr. Van Damme is closing in on his 61st birthday in a few weeks. 12 years ago, when we covered JCVD, I mentioned then that in that film he was complaining how he was almost 50 years old and he couldn't do those one-shot scenes anymore. By the same token, he was in Pound of Flesh seven years later at 55 showing off his trademark flexibility and trademark buttcheeks. In that latter film, like this one, he's playing someone younger than himself, someone born in the early 70s instead of early 60s. I kind of get it here though, as he needed to be the right age to fit with the unrest in Eastern Europe that his character was born out of. From an action standpoint, he's good here, but it felt like a lot of his fights were him dominating--especially his one with Bernhardt, which I'll get to later. It's like the Seagal problem, where he can never lose, only at least here the fights have more choreography and Van Damme isn't spending the whole film sitting. Maybe we should take our small victories when we get them.

 

Speaking of that Bernhardt fight. My issue was, it wasn't a good "these guys both know how to fight" fight, it had Van Damme dominating, so it didn't really show off what Bernhardt could do, or really give us the payoff we're looking for when we're pitting Van Damme and Bernhardt against each other from the start. It wasn't as bad as Seagal and Byron Mann in A Dangerous Man, but bad enough. As far as Bernhardt, this is now his second film on here since we've come back from hiatus, the other being Santa's Summer House, and while he had more martial arts and action in this film, I think his part in Santa's Summer House gave him more to work with. He was one when we started the blog that we had pegged as a future Hall of Famer, especially with his work in the Bloodport sequels; but then he tailed off, and we even recognized it then, in the late 2000s, that he was doing more smaller parts in big budget films--or even smaller parts in DTV films that had bigger names in them. This was more than that here, but to some extent it also followed the trend a bit too. I wonder if the main issue was, once JCVD fell into the DTV world, the parts for Bernhardt dried up. A similar thing happened to Gary Daniels, and he went a different route, getting leads in lower budget fare in places like Thailand--even doing faith-based films. How can we knock it though when Bernhardt is getting parts in big films like the John Wick franchise?

I want to get back to the storytelling device used here. For me, as someone who enjoys writing novels in my spare time, I can see how this may have looked good on paper--though even trying to map it out as a novel, it still feels like it would come off as something that would hurt the momentum of the plot to go back and forth like that, so imagining it in an action film is worse. They attempted to mitigate that by making the interactions between Reeser and her interrogators, Stormare and Alonso, more tense, but I feel like a storytelling device shouldn't need to be mitigated. Beyond that, I get that there's a bit of a Rashomon element here, as we're getting the story from the viewpoint of what Reeser wants her interrogators to know, but when we think of Rashomon, we don't see this kind of back and forth approach, each story in that is delivered individually. Action is a tricky thing, and I think we see just how tricky with all of the attempts we've witnessed over the years to reinvent the wheel with it.

 

This is another one that has Van Damme's son, Kris, in it, which I always like seeing. It seems like Van Damme kicks his ass a lot, which I kind of also get too--you need to pay your dues in this industry before you get to be the lead--look at Frank Grillo, who's finally getting those parts now. By the same token, there's a sense, whether it's Kris or his daughter Bianca, that Van Damme is passing this business down to his kids. That feels more authentic than just "your dad's Van Damme so he's going to get you into the movies," if that makes sense. According to IMDb, Kris hasn't done a film since 2018, but hopefully we'll see more of him in the future, especially getting his ass kicked by his dad in movies like this.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing, this is free to stream on Tubi, Crackle, and Plex here in the US. I think that's the way to go, especially if you're a Van Damme fan. Beyond that though, the storytelling style of going back and forth with flashbacks was disruptive, and makes it hard to recommend if you have to pay for it.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5767628/

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

 

The Bouncer (2018)

With Seagal joining the 30 Club in our last post, I couldn't let him get in and not have Van Damme in soon after. I had planned on doing Kill 'Em All for this one, but it got clipped on Tubi, and I can't find it anywhere for free or included in any of my current streaming subscriptions, so I went for this instead, because it's on Tubi. Let's see how it went.

The Bouncer is a Belgian film starring Van Damme as a man in his 50s who works as a bouncer and cares for his 8-year-old daughter that goes to an expensive private school. When he loses his job after a guy he's bouncing hits his head, his buddy gets him a new job at a strip club. When the guy that was bounced whose head was hit presses charges and it comes back to Van Damme, he's given a chance to have it all wiped away. An interpol agent or something or other wants him to go undercover at his new strip club joint to find out what his boss, a dude who's into some shady stuff, has planned. When that crime boss finds out about his daughter though, all bets are off.

This wasn't too bad. It's mostly in French with English subtitles, so if you don't like that, that's something to consider. From Van Damme's standpoint, this is more of that step above movie that he's been trying to make more of as he's gotten older, and I think this really works for him in that respect. It has action moments, and when they happen they're really well shot; but beyond that, Van Damme is someone in this character who we can invest in and want to see do well. I don't think this is a movie he would have wanted to make in 1995--and if it was presented to him, he'd probably have wanted to change it a lot--but in 2018, this Van Damme who's verging on 60 can do it, and he does it well.

Before I compare Van Damme to Seagal, I want to give Van Damme his own paragraph to celebrate his entry into the 30 Club. First off, you may be wondering why we're calling this his 30th review when he already has 30 tags. He, like Dolph, was tagged for the 400th post, which was the Van Damme film fest, so that doesn't count as a film for either of them. Anyway, when I started the site in 2007, he was put in the Hall of Fame because he had a lot of DTV flicks at that time, and while they were of varying degrees of quality, it seemed like, like Seagal, he was going exclusively DTV and putting out a lot of stuff. In 2008 that changed with JCVD. It was a transcendent performance that changed what we thought Van Damme was and who he could be on-screen. Follow that up with Expendables 2, which he essentially wins from Stallone; and Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, which was another great performance, and now Van Damme isn't just another DTV guy pumping out three flicks a year and cashing the checks. That's both good and bad, because I think that leads to something like Pound of Flesh being too big and too long as he tries to do more with it; but it also allows us to have something like The Bouncer with the depth to it that you won't find in your usual DTV flick. Now with him joining the 30 Club, the question is, does the 40 Club beckon? Because he's being choosier in his role, as best as I can tell, there are only 7 more DTV films of his I need to do, give or take, so chances are he'll cap out at the 30 Club, but we'll see.

Now to Seagal and Van Damme. This film here, which is better than probably every Seagal flick in the 2010s outside of Attrition, could not have been made by Seagal because of the way Seagal insists on his movies being made. His character can't be vulnerable; he can't be in a position of weakness, even for a short spell; he can't be shot, he can't be hit by a punch. These are all things Van Damme's character endured, and came out stronger as a result of. It's as if Seagal, who's almost ten years older than Van Damme, has not matured at all in his work as an actor and the kinds of roles he takes on--and one could say he hasn't matured as a person either based on the way he needs to be depicted in his films. I'm not saying Van Damme is perfect--say what you want about Seagal's films, but they all hover around the 90-minute mark, whereas a lot of Van Damme's go over 100 minutes, which is too much for me--but he's willing to let his characters seem weak, even if it's for a short period and he ultimately wins out in the end. He doesn't need to be perfect or omnipotent like Seagal does, and his work is better for it.

This film was directed by Julien Leclercq with Robrecht Heyvaert as the cinematographer. Leclercq has done some other action-oriented films out of his native Beligium, and Heyvaert was also director of photography for the new Bad Boys movie, and the pedigree of both really shows in the way a lot of these action sequences were shot, especially a chase scene that takes place in a parking garage. Right now America is known for the big blockbusters, but beyond that, most of the great action is coming from other places. We think of the UK, especially with the Scott Adkins/Jesse V. Johnson films, and now Ross Boyask and Stu Bennett having two successes back to back; but a film like this shows me I need to go beyond the English-speaking film world and explore what other places are doing. It's one thing that's good about having someone like Van Damme on the tin who has a worldwide audience, it gets people like me in the door and opens my eyes to other work.

Finally, getting back to this idea about foreign films with subtitles, I know it's a sticking point for a lot of people. Beyond that, we just don't do a lot of action outside of the English-speaking world here in the States, so when people think subtitles, the first thing that comes to mind is indie-art house kinds of movies. I'd be curious to know how a movie like this does on Tubi in terms of customer retention: do people start it, realize it's mostly in French with subtitles, and turn it of; or do they do like I did and go with it? That might determine if a company like Tubi takes on more films like this, because as far as I know, Tubi isn't available in Europe.

And with that, it's time to wrap this up. This is a different kind of Van Damme film, more indicative of this more mature turn he's taken in a lot more of his recent movies. If you're not a fan of subtitles, be warned; but I think even if you aren't, you should give this one a try.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7816392

Kickboxer: Retaliation (2018)

Because I did Kickboxer: Vengeance, I figured I'd need to do this one as well. And from there, I decided to do both posts back to back to get them out of the way. Why make you wait for the sequel, right? This has been covered by many other people, including our good friend Mitch at the Video Vacuum, and also Simon Abrams did a write-up for Roger Ebert's site. You know it's big if you're covering a movie Roger Ebert's site is covering.

Kickboxer: Retaliation takes place a year or so after the first one. Alain Moussi is back as our hero, this time being kidnapped and whisked away to a Thai prison, where Christopher Lambert is forcing him to fight a giant from ESPN2's World's Strongest Man competitions. When the usual attempts at coercion don't work, Lambert goes back to the tried and true damsel in distress motif, kidnapping Moussi's wife, Sara Malakul Lane, reprising her role from the first one. To train Moussi to fight this mountain of a man, we have all nature of inmates, including Van Damme again, Mike Tyson, Ronaldinho, and Roy "Big Country" Nelson. Will Moussi prevail?

This was 110 minutes long. One of my biggest rules is anything over 88 minutes is borrowed time, and here we were at almost 2 hours for a standard prison forced to fight story. That's what made me like this one less than the previous one, because that one was a cool 90 minutes. For something as paint-by-numbers as this was, closing in on two hours is beyond excessive. The Coen Brothers were able to get Hail, Caesar! in under that time, and they weren't covering well-worn territory, and had an even more prodigious cast than this. There were some good fights, which were hampered a bit by slow motion affects, but still nice to see and something I can appreciate. The final fight between Moussi and the strongman went about 30 minutes, and really just involved a lot of hitting and the people getting hit spitting Hawaiian Punch out of their mouths. The reality is, this movie was just a better version of Bloodsport 2, but longer, which made it a worse version.

Van Damme is back in the role that IMDb said was originally supposed to be Tony Jaa's, and he was great again. I can't blame him for the fact that this was too long, though he was an executive producer, so maybe I can. When you look at his current stuff, he tends to err on the side of longer movies instead of tightening things up, so I could see him thinking 110 minutes was actually too short, why not make it two and 1/2 hours? One could make the case though that Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning was five minutes longer, and I really liked that one. Yes, but that one was also covering new territory and doing new things with the characters. This is essentially Bloodsport 2, we knew where we were going, we knew what the end would be, so to delay us getting there any longer than we had to was excessive for me. One interesting thing to note with Van Damme as well: this is his 30th tag, but not official entrance into the 30 Club, because one of his tags is post 400, the Van Dame Film Fest. He'll get there soon enough though, I promise.

It's been over nine years since we last saw the film's other Hall of Famer, Christopher Lambert, here on the DTVC, which feels like too long. (The funny thing is I mentioned Hail, Caesar!, and he was in that as well.) Lambert is essentially playing the Ben Franklin role from Bloodsport IV, and it was fun to see him here as a baddie. I've looked through his IMDb, and a lot of his stuff is of the foreign language art house variety, which I enjoy, but doesn't really fit what we're doing here for DTV. One thing this had that was nice was a sword fight between Van Damme and Lambert. One thing it was missing which really disappointed me, was the two of them speaking in French to one another.

A fascinating aspect of Van Damme's career has been the DTV sequels to his movies that star someone other than him. We've talked about the Kickboxer and Bloodsport ones. There was also a Time Cop sequel and syndicated TV show. Universal Soldier first had made-for-TV sequels, then had two DTV sequels that did star him. And maybe when that happened it opened the door for him to try these two as well, because they are, essentially, DTV sequels, trading on a franchise name that he established theatrically. What's interesting is that in this age of franchises and using franchise names on the tin to draw streams and rentals, all but these and a Scott Adkins Hard Target sequel have disappeared. You'd think that someone would make a new Bloodsport or Universal Soldier, if only to trade on the name the way these are, but so far that hasn't happened. I guess we'll see.

While there are these Kickboxer reboots with Alain Moussi--and a third one is in development--there are reports that Albert Pyun was working with Sasha Mitchell to do their own Kickboxer sequels. How amazing would that be? The thing is, these new Kickboxer reboots would have a lot more resources than Pyun would have with his own, especially when he works independently--I bet this film's Hawaiian Punch budget would be more than the budget for an entire Pyun production. But if he can keep them between 80 and 90 minutes, I think they could give these a run for their money. (Seriously, every time someone in this film gets hit in the face, they spray this stream of Hawaiian Punch spit into the air. It's like they're using cases of it, or constantly chewing Cherry Starburst in order to produce that effect.)

And I guess this wraps it up. Like its predecessor, you can get this on Netflix. This wouldn't be a bad DTV actioner if it had a tighter runtime. We're covering ground that has been covered plenty of times before, which is fun, but maybe not almost two hours fun, if that makes sense. It is nice to see all the people in it though, and there were some good fight scenes. I also now have a hankering for Hawaiian Punch...

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5208950

Kickboxer: Vengeance (2016)

This is one of those ones that came out while I was on hiatus, but knew I needed to look at. I remembered it being advertised as a theatrical release, but never made it out to see it, and when I looked it up on IMDb, discovered it barely crossed a quarter of a million dollars worldwide. With all that star power, plus Van Damme being attached to it, what happened? Well, let's see if we can dive in and find out?

Kickboxer: Vengeance is a reboot of the Van Damme original, this time with Alain Moussi playing the Kurt Sloan character. After his brother, played by the late Darren Shahlavi, is killed in the ring by Tong Po when shady fight promoter Gina Carano sets up the match, Moussi vows revenge. So he goes to Thailand, gets beaten up by Tong Po, gets arrested, and then gets trained by Van Damme so he can win. Also, he meets a love interest in local police office Sara Malaku Lane, who is investigating Tong Po for a criminal operation he might be running. The question is, can Van Damme train Moussi well enough to beat the seemingly unbeatable Tong Po?

What do you think happened? Paint-by-numbers doesn't begin to describe this, and I guess for what it was, it wasn't bad. I really liked Van Damme as the trainer, that was probably the major standout. Beyond that, I was left wondering why this was made at all, because it didn't attempt to cover any new territory from the original. On the other hand, at a compact 90 minutes, it is good for a standard DTV fight film--the thing is, you could have called it any number of titles and it would've stood out as a solid Van Damme flick. I think that may be why this didn't do so hot in the theater, people probably looked at it and thought "I don't know who this Moussi guy is, and I don't get why Bautista is Tong Po, and I have the original Kickboxer on DVD, why don't I just watch that and not pay the exorbitant theater prices?" Beyond the fact that it has names in it, there isn't much to distinguish it from the Sasha Mitchell/Albert Pyun sequels, which I don't think Van Damme was going for when he signed on for this.

Van Damme as our film's one Hall of Famer does show up in a big way as the trainer. This is the problem though that you have when introducing us to someone new: the established name tends to overshadow them. It seems like a great idea at the time--make Van Damme the trainer--but when he's killing it in every scene while Moussi's trying to establish himself, it's hard for the audience to not just say "why isn't Van Damme training to fight Bautista?" I guess too there's the issue that Van Damme's character was killed off in the Pyun part two, so maybe they were afraid we'd cry foul if they brought him back when he was supposed to be dead and make a Universal Soldier style sequel. The thing is though, the two John Hyams sequels after that one did cover new territory, especially the second one; and Scott Adkins was established enough to be able to carry it and not be overshadowed by another great Van Damme performance. I read in the IMDb trivia that Van Damme wasn't even the original choice, it was supposed to be Tony Jaa, which is even crazier. At least with Van Damme we can say "you've done so many martial arts movies, we're okay with you being the trainer," but with Jaa all we would've thought is "why aren't you fighting Tong Po?"

I think the thing that would have made this something better and different would have been casting Gina Carano in the lead instead. That's doing something new with it. Carano is trained in Muay Thai, so she'd fit, and casting a female in the lead, especially one with the established star power of Carano, would take this franchise into the 21st century. Not only that, but her name would've gotten people into the theaters to see this. I'm not saying I don't like Moussi, on the contrary I think he's great, but he's also safe, and this is what safe got you, a standard solid Van Damme DTV flick that made a quart-million worldwide. I don't know if you'd have Carano fight Bautista, but why did we need Bautista as Tong Po anyway? Michel Qissi was only 6'2", that's plenty tall enough--actually what if Moussi had played the baddie, he's also 6'2". Now you can introduce Moussi, he takes his lumps by losing to Carano, and everyone's happy. Van Damme really took a chance with JCVD, it's a shame the people making this didn't here.

That's the problem with the binary zero-sum way we have of looking at things, if I say Carano would have been a better choice for the lead because it would have done something to push the franchise forward, it sounds like I'm saying I don't like Moussi, and that's not true. I thought he was great, and think he could be a great up-and-comer in the DTV action realm. Add him to the list after Adkins, Tony Jaa, Iko Uwais, Matt Mullins, Natalie Burn, Stu Bennett--and now it looks like Carano is doing more DTV stuff too. It's a big break for him to get this franchise, and I think it'll be interesting to see what he does from here.

Finally, it looks like this was the last feature film that Darren Shahlavi did before he passed in 2015. I said in the Pound of Flesh post that it was a shame, because he was starting to really break through. He has only a small part here, being the brother who's killed by Tong Po to spark Moussi's revenge quest. According to IMDb, Scott Adkins was originally offered this part, and he said no. The reality is, with what this turned out to be, Adkins was too big for a part like that, so it was good he turned it down; but for Shahlavi, someone still trying to get to where Adkins was, this was a step in the right direction, and it's a shame that we'll never see where the rest of the steps were going to take him. He may not have had the films or influence to merit entry into the DTVC Hall of Fame, but he is included in our Legends Who Have Left US page, so at least we've been able to honor him there.

On that note, let's wrap this up. This isn't horrible, it's good for a standard DTV fight film. It would have been nice if they did something new with it, especially since they're rebooting a franchise as iconic as Kickboxer, and the fact that they didn't has me wondering why they decided to reboot it at all; but take the name away and forget it's a reboot of something, and it works. Also, getting it on Netflix where I'm paying less per month to stream all their films as opposed to paying more than that for one movie ticket to see it in theater makes me a bit more forgiving.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3082898