Directed by Peter Hyams. Written by Eric Bromberg & James Bromberg. Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Tom Everett Scott, Orlando Jones, Linzey Cocker, Christopher Robbie, Kris Van Damme, Zahari Baharov, Dimo Alexiev, Vladimir Mihaylov, Teodor Tzolov. (R, 85 mins)
Back in the late '80s, Jean-Claude Van Damme built his fan base and became a star the old-fashioned way: by working his ass off. As he graduated from low-budget B-movies that became surprise box-office hits (1988's BLOODSPORT, 1989's CYBORG) to bigger-budgeted A-list fare (1992's UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, 1993's HARD TARGET, 1994's TIMECOP), he became a proven player with a solid track record. By 1996, he had enough clout that Universal let him star in and direct his pet project THE QUEST, and then it all started to implode. THE QUEST bombed, followed by tabloid fodder like multiple marriages, stories of drug abuse and being labeled "difficult." In his memoir My Word is My Bond, THE QUEST villain Roger Moore offered this observation on being asked what it was like working with Van Damme: "I've always believed that if you can't say something nice about someone, don't say anything at all. So I'll say nothing at all." The movies kept tanking (1997's DOUBLE TEAM, 1998's KNOCK OFF), LEGIONNAIRE (1998) went straight to video, and the "Muscles from Brussels" was becoming something between an industry pariah and punchline. After 1999's last-ditch, desperation Hail Mary UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN, Van Damme's movies started bypassing theaters altogether. But then a funny thing happened: he straightened up his act, settled down, and focused on his work, and the movies were often shockingly good. Much like his earlier days, Van Damme was once more building his career by word-of-mouth: low-budget B-movies like the gritty IN HELL (2003), WAKE OF DEATH (2004), UNTIL DEATH (2007), and THE SHEPHERD (2008) are as good as, if not better, than many of the films from his theatrical heyday. The 2008 meta/mockumentary/confessional JCVD got some acclaim but didn't open any serious doors for him, and after a few more quality DTV outings like UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION (2009) and ASSASSINATION GAMES (2011), Van Damme was invited back to the big screen to play the villain in THE EXPENDABLES 2 (2012), and the Van Dammessaince was on. The brilliant UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (2012) managed to get raves from serious cineastes, and a recent Volvo commercial became a viral sensation. Everyone loves an underdog, and once more, after years of hard work and rebuilding his reputation, the 53-year-old Van Damme has engineered the quietest comeback in recent memory, even if some are approaching it ironically. He never went away--it's just that he managed to accomplish some of his best work when the industry dismissed him and no one was paying attention.
I've been saying for years that Van Damme would make a great Bond villain, and THE EXPENDABLES 2 did a nice job of demonstrating that. His latest film, ENEMIES CLOSER, again finds JCVD in bad-guy mode, with the initial focus on Henry Taylor (Tom Everett Scott), a ranger at a park near the US/Canada border. He's the only employee and lives in the ranger station, with only one other resident--cranky old Mr. Sanderson (Christopher Robbie)--living on the other end of the park. Taylor prefers the solitude after dealing with the emotional and physical scars of time spent in the military, serving in Afghanistan. After helping stranded hiker Kayla (Linzey Cocker), the two make a dinner date, but it's put on the backburner when Taylor is approached at gunpoint at the ranger station by Clay (Orlando Jones). Clay has a personal beef with Taylor: his younger brother was killed in Afghanistan and Taylor was his commanding officer. Taylor tries to explain that Clay's brother got separated from their group and he was given orders to leave him behind. Taylor had a breakdown and spent years blaming himself and the ranger job was as far as he could run from the world. Clay doesn't buy any of it and takes him out to the deep woods to execute him.
Meanwhile, a plane filled with a large heroin shipment has crashed in the lake surrounding the island park. Just as the skeleton crew of border patrol officers ("It's just us...they only care about the Mexican border!" one officer laments) goes to investigate, they're massacred by Xander (Van Damme), the eccentric, environmentally-conscious, vegan cartel boss who's introduced talking about his refusal to wear leather shoes and the methane in cow farts. Xander and his crew encounter Taylor and Clay just as Clay's about to kill Taylor. Shots are fired, and the hunt is on as Xander and his crew start pursuing Taylor and Clay through the massive park, forcing the two men to set aside their differences and work together...
...if they don't kill each other first!
The script by Eric and James Bromberg has a lot in the way of logic lapses--why would Taylor and Clay leave Xander's last remaining henchman merely knocked out instead of killing him like they did all the others? (this flunky is played by JCVD's son Kristopher Van Varenberg, who's now just cutting the shit and going by "Kris Van Damme"; Van Damme keeps putting his kids in his movies, and it needs to stop, though Kris is a marginally better actor than his sister Bianca Bree). Why, you ask? Well, so he can pull a surprise appearance just when he needs to, and prompt Clay to grumble "I shoulda killed you when I had the chance." YES, YOU SHOULD HAVE! The Sanderson character is absolutely pointless and there's no shortage of trite dialogue when Van Damme is offscreen (at one point, Clay says "I didn't prepare for a war," to which Taylor actually replies "This war came to us"). There's a third-act twist that you'll see coming long before Taylor and Clay do, but for all its predictability and occasional stupidity, ENEMIES CLOSER is entertaining thanks to a completely unhinged performance by Van Damme. Sporting a bizarre hairstyle that looks like Christopher Walken in a high humidity climate, mugging shamelessly, complaining that Taylor's coffee isn't fair trade, and prone to waxing rhapsodic about a childhood that included a pet goose named Edith Piaf, Van Damme sinks his teeth into this thing, devouring every bit of scenery that he can. It's a thoroughly cartoonish performance that's engineered to go over the top, and seeing Van Damme do his best "Gary Oldman-in-THE PROFESSIONAL" is impossible to resist.
This is the star's third collaboration with veteran director Peter Hyams (TIMECOP, SUDDEN DEATH), a past master of commercial genre fare, with BUSTING (1974), CAPRICORN ONE (1978), OUTLAND (1981), and RUNNING SCARED (1986) to his name. Now 70, Hyams was once respected enough in the industry to be entrusted with helming 2010, the surprisingly solid 1984 sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), but he's been skidding for well over a decade, hitting bottom with A SOUND OF THUNDER (2005), a complete disaster that was abandoned by its producers and actually released with unfinished special effects after three years on the shelf. ENEMIES CLOSER is no Hyams classic, but it's his best film since 1997's THE RELIC. He doesn't really bring any distinct touches (Hyams in his 1974-1986 prime, when he was scripting his own films, had a distinct "Hyams" feel--just check out Hal Holbrook's incredible CAPRICORN ONE monologue), other than having one character named "Spota," a name that turns up in many of his films (it's his wife's maiden name). Van Damme and Hyams obviously like one another and enjoy working together, and Van Damme has also starred in three films directed by Hyams' son John, including the instant cult classic UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING. John Hyams served as editor on ENEMIES CLOSER, and the film, shot in Bulgaria and Louisiana, feels more in line with the current crop of high-end DTV fare cranked out by the likes of John Hyams and Isaac Florentine. It's probably a good bet that a lot of that was achieved in the editing stages with John helping his old man out. Peter Hyams is more than capable of pulling off a high-intensity action flick, but in the many fight scenes, the influence of John Hyams, who's becoming a genuine action auteur in his own right, is very obvious.
It's too bad Lionsgate and After Dark Films aren't capitalizing on the Van Dammessaince and giving this a bigger rollout than a handful of theaters and VOD, but given the tepid commercial response to the recent string of quality aging action star vehicles that don't feature the word "expendables" in the title, you can't really be surprised. Sure, Van Damme doesn't have--and probably never will have--the box office pull that he once did, and nobody in 2014 is going to the multiplex to see Tom Everett Scott or Orlando Jones, but it's just a bit disheartening to see the company dump this one off but put I, FRANKENSTEIN on 3000 screens.
This Montreal-shot fugitives-on-the-run thriller from Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky (ANATOMY, THE COUNTERFEITERS) offers an intriguing set-up but quickly gives way to cliches and contrivances before completely collapsing in the third act. Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde are siblings who pull off a day-before-Thanksgiving Michigan casino heist before wrecking their car on a snowy rural road. With Detroit cops and highway patrol in hot pursuit, they split up, Bana finding refuge with a family at a cabin where he kills the abusive stepfather, and Wilde with ex-con Charlie Hunnam, a disgraced boxer who may have accidentally killed his crooked manager about ten minutes after being paroled that morning. Hunnam and Wilde have some drinks at a bar and have sex in a motel room, so of course, they're in love the next morning and he takes her home to the family farm to meet mom Sissy Spacek and dad Kris Kristofferson. Naturally, an injured Bana is already there holding Mom and Dad hostage, and he's not very happy that his sister, for whom he harbors controlling and probably incestuous feelings, is in love with Hunnam. So with local deputy Kate Mara and her sexist, asshole sheriff father Treat Williams (why do the filmmakers make this character even more hateful than Bana?) closing in, an increasingly wild-eyed Bana decides to gather everyone for Thanksgiving dinner and poke them with sticks by getting into their heads and re-opening family wounds. Because hey, why not? It's not like the clock's ticking or anything.
It's too bad Ruzowitzky and debuting screenwriter Zach Dean gather all of these fine actors around a table only to have them go through some really tired soap opera melodrama. DEADFALL has some OK moments and there's snippets of genuine suspense, but the whole thing is so rote and hackneyed that it rarely rises above the level of strictly average. Most of the cast can't win playing such implausible characters (Wilde and Williams, in particular), but Kristofferson and Spacek do some really nice work here, convincingly conveying the strong sense of familiarity of a hard-working couple who've been together forever and can communicate in their own verbal shorthand or with just a look. DEADFALL feels most real in these few quiet moments with these two. (R, 95 mins)
ALEX CROSS (US - 2012)
Tyler Perry steps out of his comfort zone and into Morgan Freeman's shoes in this reboot of the wildly popular "James Patterson"® bestsellers that previously spawned the films KISS THE GIRLS (1997) and ALONG CAME A SPIDER (2001). Judging from the film's paltry box office, audiences weren't really interested in Tyler Perry: Action Hero. It's easy to mock Perry and make Madea jokes, but while he gets some points for trying, he's really not good here, though a lot of it is just bad writing. Maybe Freeman can sell the whole Sherlockian awareness of everything going on around him and being able to "tell that you had scrambled eggs for breakfast at 100 yards," but where Freeman plays authoritative and dignified, Perry glowers, growls, and overacts, turning Cross into more of a gun-toting, vengeance-obsessed, action-movie badass. It doesn't help that Cross is squaring off against a cartoonish supervillain in Matthew Fox's hired assassin "Picasso," on a spree at the behest of a corporate benefactor and so-called because he leaves clues to his next killing in intricate charcoal drawings at the murder scenes. Fox lost an alarming amount of weight for the role and turned what he had left into pure muscle. It's an unusual level of dedication for a film so silly and inconsequential, and he might've been more effective if his performance didn't rely on so many cliches (bulging eyes, wicked grins, calling Cross and taunting him, etc). There isn't one surprise here, unless you count how the filmmakers give police psychologist Cross a pass for breaking almost every law in the book, justifying it with Picasso killing Cross' pregnant wife (Carmen Ejogo). The film moves the novels' setting from D.C. to Detroit, presumably for production tax incentive purposes, though most of the film has downtown Cleveland filling in for Detroit, at least until Cross and Picasso's climactic showdown at the old Michigan Building, in the theater refurbished as a parking garage.
Also with Edward Burns and Rachel Nichols as Cross' partners, Cicely Tyson as Nana Mama, Jean Reno as a French billionaire targeted by Picasso, John C. McGinley as Cross' boss who's always reading Cross the riot act even though he's right 100% of the time, numerous scenes with Cross revealing key plot information to his clueless associates while the camera urgently circles around them, and one of the least-convincing CGI explosions ever seen in a major theatrical release. The one-sheet's tag line reads "Don't ever cross Alex Cross." Well, it's probably a good idea to not ever watch ALEX CROSS, either. (PG-13, 101 mins)
UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (US - 2012)
Sometimes a really ambitious and inventive film can get made when nobody's paying much attention, and UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (the fourth film in the franchise, sixth if you count two made-for-TV movies) is anything but another by-the-numbers action outing. Its VOD and limited theatrical release in late 2012 got some unexpected praise from some serious critics, and the film displays a level of depth and intelligence that demand it to be taken seriously. Director/co-writer John Hyams made 2010's UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION and returns with original UniSols Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, essentially supporting characters with the focus on John (Scott Adkins), who sees his wife and daughter brutally murdered in a home invasion led by UniSol Luc Devereaux (Van Damme). Awakening from a coma nine months later, John struggles to figure out who he is and why he's haunted by these painful memories. It turns out Devereaux is rounding up a rogue army of former UniSols and implanting a chemical that makes them consciously aware of their status as mind-controlled government killing machines. John discovers Devereaux is living deep in the Louisiana bayou, a messianic cult leader to a band of rogue warriors acting on their own volition, away from a government that can no longer control them. Is John one of these UniSols? Is Devereaux the real Devereaux?
US: DOR has Christopher Nolan-sized ideas on a DTV budget and you'd have to possess the ability of psychic premonition to have expected a film like this from Hyams (son of veteran director Peter Hyams), whose efforts to date have been unimpressive, to put it mildly. While some plot elements may borrow liberally from INCEPTION, THE TERMINATOR, and APOCALYPSE NOW (it's an intentional homage as John's journey down a river to Devereaux's camp even has a nearly-identical repetitive music cue heard when Martin Sheen arrived at Marlon Brando's compound), Hyams creates a surreal, disorientingly harsh, horrifyingly violent (30 seconds of splatter were cut to avoid an NC-17 rating), and potentially audience-alienating atmosphere throughout US: DOR. At times, the film feels like a waking nightmare that's being secretly directed by Gaspar Noe. It's almost experimental in the way it uses sound and visuals (particularly a dizzying strobe effect), and even with the impressive action sequences, there's no doubt that some people will absolutely hate this. Hyams even says as much on the commentary track, stating the script is admittedly "a little far off the reservation." It occasionally bites off more than it can chew and it goes on a bit longer than it needs to, but Hyams deserves a lot of credit for not going the easy route, and attempting--and very often succeeding--to create a significantly more unique, daring, and thought-provoking film than anything you'd expect something titled UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING to be. An instant cult classic. (R, 113 mins)
HARA-KIRI: DEATH OF A SAMURAI (UK/Japan - 2011; 2012 US release)
Originally shot in 3D, Takashi Miike's remake of Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 classic HARAKIRI examines the same themes of honor and hypocrisy and retains most of the major plot details while deviating quite a bit in the third act. Miike, who's not quite as prolific and eager to shock as he was in his AUDITION, VISITOR Q, and ICHI THE KILLER glory days, fashions his HARA-KIRI as a dramatic companion piece of sorts to his excellent 2010 remake of Eiichi Kudo's 13 ASSASSINS (1963). Where 13 ASSASSINS finds unemployed samurai overjoyed at finally having a way to go out in a blaze of glory, this film has warriors on the other end of the spectrum: broke, jobless, without purpose, and struggling to survive in a world that no longer requires their unique skills. Miike's HARA-KIRI is one of his most restrained films, a samurai story with powerful drama, emotion, and tragedy at its core. In feudal Japan of 1630, peace has led to many unemployed samurai attempting suicide bluffs, where, in the name of honor, they request to commit seppuku in the courtyard of a feudal lord, usually resulting in a small job, a meal, or in the best cases, a financial handout from the sympathetic lord. The lord of the House of Ii is away when penniless ronin Hanshiro Tsugomo (Ebizo Ichikawa) requests to use the courtyard for ritual suicide. The lord's chief counsel Kageyu (Koji Yokusho) tries to talk Tsugomo out of his decision by telling him the story of Monome (Eita), who similarly requested to commit seppuku in the courtyard, resulting in Kageyu and the Ii samurai calling Monome's bluff and making him go through with it despite not even having a real sword, instead just one made of wood for show. Monome had a sick wife and child at home and heard about the suicide bluffs and decided to use it as a last resort. Tsugomo then informs Kageyu that he indeed knows Monome, and tells his own story about how the two are connected, and why he's really at the House of Ii. Ichikawa turns in a devastating performance as Tsugomo, often rivaling the finest work of Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai in the samurai classics of old. Miike's film is leisurely paced but never dull, and there's a bizarre finale with long takes and intricate choreography that feels like a Kurosawa samurai battle restaged by Blake Edwards. (Unrated, 128 mins)
