The Action Elite Presents: Icons of Action

Last week, The Action Elite unveiled their top 70 list of the Best Action Heroes of All Time. Main man Eoin Friel enlisted the help of fellow writers, bloggers, screenwriters, directors and #MovieBros to chime in with write ups of their favorite heroes. I picked up two Jean-Claude Van Damme performances, first as Chance Boudreaux in John Woo's 1993 shooting, explosion and face kicking fest Hard Target at # 46 (ahead of Tom Cruise as Mission Impossible's Ethan Hunt and behind Chuck Norris as Lone Wolf McQuade):

“Hunting season is over.”
While Jean-Claude Van Damme was never known for machine gun mayhem a la Stallone in Rambo or Schwarzenegger in Commando; Hard Target’s Chance Boudreaux comes dangerously close to pure action movie territory.
As a decorated former member of Marine Force Recon turned down on his luck sailor, Boudreaux stumbles into a deadly game put on by rich hunters. Their prey? Military veterans. When beautiful and smart yet out of her neighborhood lawyer Natasha Binder (Yancy Butler) comes looking for her missing father, she uncovers the darker side of Dixie in the violent and seedy underworld of New Orleans.
Teaming with Chance, the pair take on the evil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen), his right hand man Pik van Cleef (Arnold Vosloo) and their small army of well-armed sportsmen (including Arnold’s buddy Sven-Ole Thorsen).
Recruiting Hong Kong action maestro John Woo for his first American film, Hard Target is full of violently slick, slow motion fight and shootout sequences that see Van Damme filling the bad guys with lead before finishing them off with a spinning hook kick to the face.
Like a greasy mullet’ed samurai in a denim shirt and tight jeans; J.C.V.D.’s Chance fights, chases and shoots it out with Fouchon’s crew using fists, pistols, shotguns, pigeons, gasoline, roundhouse kicks and one-liners. All of this while moto-surfing on a motorcycles standing up, outrunning a helicopter on horseback through Louisiana’s streets, back country and of course a warehouse to save the girl and take revenge for their dead comrades.
If that weren’t enough, Chance flexes his muscles, gets shot, doesn’t get burned by fire and drops a grenade down Fouchon’s pants during the explosion and bullet filled finale.

Followed by Frank Dux in the underground fighting epic Bloodsport at # 18 (ahead of Steven Seagal in Under Siege, suck it! And behind Robocop, respect.):

“You told me to use any technique that worked.  Never to limit myself to one style. To keep an open mind!”
The appeal of Bloodsport and Frank Dux is twofold.  The purported true story of a covert military operator who fights in secret no holds barred tournaments seemed tailor made for the big screen.  Especially an 80’s, Cannon Films produced flick starring a then unknown Jean-Claude Van Damme.
While many of Dux’s military and martial arts claims have been debunked, the tale of an underground competition to find the world’s supreme warrior and fighting champion has entertained and influenced a generation. From video game Street Fighter to Mixed Martial Arts giant the UFC, Bloodsport’s world warrior, style vs style inspiration lives on nearly 30 years later.
In J.C.V.D.’s breakthrough and signature role, the Muscles From Brussels combined his background in karate, weight training and ballet to create a powerful yet graceful onscreen presence that more than made up for his lack of acting experience.  As A.W.O.L. Air Force Captain Frank Dux, Van Damme puts his career and life on the line in order to fight in the Kumite, a full contact event held every five years.
With high kicks and the ability to do the splits at his disposal, Dux battles the best in karate, sumo and muy thai to try and be the best he can be while honoring his mentor and avenging fallen friends.
Whether enduring nearly inhuman physical training, doing the splits between two chairs, fighting blindly in the final match, running the streets of Hong Kong in a Mustard suit or telling another man “I love you my friend”; Jean-Claude Van Damme shows us how an action hero can be kick ass, yet sensitive.

It was a lot of fun and a pleasure to be included. The full list is fantastic and houses contributions from a spectrum of devoted action movie junkies. It skewed a little modern and of course male but John Wayne, Charles Bronson, Steve McQueen, Sigourney Weaver, Linda Hamilton and Uma Thurman made it in while we could have used some Lee Marvin or Kirk Douglas for The Dirty Dozen and Spartacus. And Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese aka the Father of the Future!

Vernal Viewing: Divergent

We now live in a cinematic age of comic book and Young Adult fiction adaptations, why?  Because they're a readily available source material that have name brand recognition to at least one segment of society and studios are just looking for that next hit franchise a la Iron Man, Twilight, Harry Potter and Batman.  So far, the YA market has seen it's hits like Twilight and Hunger Games as well as it's misses including Mortal Instruments, The Host and Ender's Game.  This past weekend, new challenger to the throne, Divergent, opened at # 1 with a healthy $56 million take and a solid A cinemascore.  A sequel has already been greenlit but it's being helmed by the guy who did RIPD so we might be in trouble...While I can't wrap my head around why people like Hunger Games, I did enjoy the crap out of Ender's Game.  Divergent fell in-between for me.  The story of a future Chicago where a wall protects the survivors of a great war and the population is split into five factions based on a test and the subject's choice whether they're kind, smart, honest, fearless, etc.


Tris (Shailene Woodley) is a young woman who has parents in the caring clan (they all have names but my memory isn't that good) that run the government.  Since she was a young girl she's dreamed of joining the Dauntless aka the wild boys who run free and protect the city.  Her test results show she's Divergent, which means she isn't just one trait, she's all of them and better.  But she has to hide it or risk being hunted down and killed as being different is a threat to the society leaders run by Titanic's Kate Winslet.  On the day of faction choosing, Tris goes against her parents' wishes and joins Dauntless, where she meets James Franco's athletic older brother Four (Theo James), who along with Eric (Jai Courtney), train all the new recruits and select how and where they'll end up serving.  Tris pushes herself physically and mentally to be accepted into the clan but her Divergent powers begin to show themselves in later phases of mental training.  Soon, all heck breaks loose as Winslet plans a coup d'état to overthrow the current governing body, drugs the Dauntless to become her personal army and begins her quest to wipe out any objectors.  Tris, with the help of her parents and a few rebels, fight back and save the day.

All in, Divergent has a lot going for it.  Director Neil Burger sets up the world so it seems less flimsy than The Hunger Games' shaky foundation of opulence and poverty taken straight from a text book.  There's a low watt cast of familiar faces throughout like Maggie Q, Jai Courtney, Ray Stevenson, Mekhi Phifer and Ashley Judd to support the young and talented Woodley.  There's a lot to do in the movie and much of it includes setting up the world, Tris' training, developing her relationship with Four, exploring her Divergent-ness so by the time the shit starts to hit the fan, you're wondering how much longer it's going to go on.  Like a John Woo movie or Return of the King, Divergent could have ended at least 5 times but kept going.  What made it more interesting for me was that Tris actually does stuff in the movie, she goes against her family, goes outside her comfort zone and joins the clan she's always wanted to be part of.  She won't be left behind and is always moving, not just reacting or getting dragged along like Mystique was in Hunger Games.  Film universe wise, I hope the filmmakers and writers sent a thank you note to the crews of Starship Troopers and Equilibrium because there's a lot from both of those movies here.  You can literally count off the Troopers similarities:  co-ed showers, a remark about statistically hitting a target and then a whole knife throwing/hand incident.

On the negative side, Miles Teller and Jai Courtney's unimpressive performances basically spell doom for their future portrayals of Mr. Fantastic in the Fantastic Four reboot and Kyle Reese in the new Terminator series.  Teller plays a bully here but seriously, who wouldn't slap that weak chinned, K.D. Lang lookalike in the face and send him crying?  Then Courtney, from Die Hard 5 fame, continues his hard man/brute routine only this time with a Macklemore haircut.  Kyle Reese is a sensitive action hero who gave up his life for love.  I just don't see Courtney being able to pull that off.  Oh and also, for future Chicago, there's two Asians and I don't think any Latinos.  This was strictly a white people party with a few black guests future.  Most of Tris' contemporaries are young, white males with brown hair, so when one of them is revealed to be a threat, you can't even tell which one he is.

Getting the early buzz going:

View In Peace: James "Jim" Jacks and Hard Target

Earlier this week, the death of movie producer James "Jim" Jacks quietly hit the news and interwebs in the form of a few brief articles and a couple detailed write ups from friends and collaborators like Kevin Smith and Harry Knowles.  His name might not strike the household familiarity of say a Jerry Bruckheimer or to a lesser extent Joel Silver but Jacks amassed a list of timeless classics like Jean-Claude Van Damme as a greasy mulleted samurai in Hard Target, the action ensemble western classic Tombstone, Richard Linklater's seminal Dazed and Confused, Kevin Smith's maligned but awesome Mallrats, Benecio Del Toro and Tommy Lee Jones' Rambo update The Hunted and his most successful work, 1999's The Mummy.  The Mummy was followed by two hit sequels and a successful spin off, The Scorpion King; which has had now spawned 3 direct to video sequels (the latest featuring Michael Biehn!).

A former wall street analyst who turned to screenwriting before working acquisitions at Universal and segueing into producing, Jacks is said to have been a hardcore movie lover.  1993 was a banner year for him as Hard Target, Dazed and Confused and Tombstone all hit theaters across the country.  Each holds it's own place in my and cinema's lore as they have all transcended generations and still resonate 20 years on.  Even though each title is held in high regard, at least two of them never matched the original intent of Jacks and his partners in celluloid.

By the early 90's, Jean-Claude Van Damme was the still the hot, young guy coming up the action ladder following Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger while competing with fellow new to the scene martial artist, Steven Seagal.  After a string of successful, low budget karate movies, 1992's Universal Soldier was his first decent budget, more mainstream action affair that had a talented director and studio support.  The flick performed well around the world and JCVD tried his hand at further broadening his audience with Nowhere To Run, a modern day Shane where VD protects a mother and her kids from evil land owners.  With nary a roundhouse kick or full split to be seen, Nowhere To Run might have fulfilled the Belgian's desire to try something different but audiences did not turn out and grosses were less than his previous 3 films.

Hard Target was the beginning of Van Damme's real push into the big leagues (it was also my second R-rated movie in a theater).  Universal saw his potential and figured with the right support, he could break into the $50-60 million grosses and join Arnold and Sly at the top of the mountain.  Former Navy Seal Chuck Pfarrer's (Navy Seals!) script is the story of Chance Boudreaux, a Merchant Marine struggling to make a living who helps out a young lawyer searching for her missing father.  Turns out her dad was a Vietnam veteran who agreed to be the subject of a twisted game that finds rich hunters paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to track and kill their fellow man.  Lance Henriksen and Arnold Vosloo turn up as the dastardly duo behind the sick scheme and it's up to Van Damme, the chick from Drop Zone (Yancy Butler) and mother fucking Wilford Brimley to stop them.

I'm not sure whose idea it was to go after noted Hong Kong director John Woo but the mayhem maestro behind The Killer signed on for his first American feature after Jacks and Universal set their sights on him.  Van Damme gave his stamp of approval but unfortunately, the $18 million production would be awash with problems from Van Damme being given far reaching creative control to Woo's unfamiliarity with the English language and American filmmaking process.  See, in Hong Kong, movies shoot for a while, stop and assess then continue on.  You can't do that kind of thing in America as studios need product to fill their slate so Woo was stranded without his team, working in a language not his own and a nervous studio watching over his shoulder.  Universal enlisted Evil Dead and Darkman director Sam Raimi to the production, ready to take over if Woo fell behind.  Even though Raimi was in awe of Woo and didn't think he would be able to bring anything better to the project.

After re-shooting the final confrontation between Van Damme and Henriksen, editing the picture would find the Muscles From Brussels presenting his own version along with Woo's cut that had to be trimmed down to avoid an NC-17 rating.  Jacks supported Woo's version as they didn't want a typical "Van Damme movie".  Test screenings were horrendous but finally on August 20th of 1993, Hard Target hit theaters, opening to $10 million on it's way to a $32 million total.  The tally was higher than Nowhere to Run but less than Universal Soldier.  Critics would deem it Van Damme's best but Woo's worst.  As it stands, Hard Target is a well made and violent action picture that does it's best to mesh Woo's human drama mixed with balletic gun violence and Van Damme's high kicking super heroics.  You get way too much slow motion, lots of close ups, bad puns, shoot'em ups, kick'em ups, jack rabbits slapping bears, horses, snake smacking, Mardi Gras, Lance Henriksen being set on fire, mama's taking chances and Ted Raimi saying "I ain't got no change, man!".

Post mortem, Van Damme would dismiss Hard Target for having a bad script and too much "John Woo bullshit" but having some good action and making him look strong.  Woo would remain political and say they did the best they could with what they had and didn't close the door on working with Van Damme again.  It never happened.  Van Damme would go on to his biggest hit, Timecop, before turning down a huge deal with Universal and sliding into a career funk filled with drug problems and messy divorces.  Woo would go on to find success after success, working with John Travolta, Nicolas Cage and Tom Cruise on Broken Arrow, Face/Off and Mission Impossible II before returning to Chinese cinema following the poorly received Windtalkers and Paycheck.

Come back next time as we check out Jacks' work on a fellow, troubled production: Tombstone.  Until then, enjoy Van Damme beating up some thugs after having some tragic gumbo.