Sudden Death

Famously favouring a self-centered method of film assembly that prioritises successive shots of his own tanned, pumped-up muscles, it's clear then that Jean-Claude Van Damme was barred from Sudden Death's editing suite. Never mind that the action star barely gets to strip down to his vest, there are even long stretches of director Peter Hyams' take on the Die Hard hostage-taking formula in which Van Damme's Darren McCord is nowhere to be seen at all. The film instead preferring to painstakingly describe the mugging cruelty of Powers Boothe's evil Secret Service agent, as he offs a series of wailing hostages while a Stanley Cup final plays out, or the specific seating arrangements of Jean-Claude's onscreen children - Whittni Wright as daughter Emily and Sleepless in Seattle's Ross Malinger as the thoroughly unlikable Tyler. It's as if entire workplace interludes showing McCord in his natural environment have been excised. An unguarded, human touch in his character's depiction having been deemed extraneous. 

This presumed disinterest in the Muscles from Brussels is compounded by a screenplay - credited to Gene Quintano but based on a story by Karen Baldwin, the wife of Pittsburgh Penguins owner Howard Baldwin - that offers almost none of the verbal back-biting you might expect from a stressed Everyman. Similarly, a style of visual arrangement and shot ordering that isn't particularly excited about highlighting cracking, blunt trauma impact doesn't help the action star much either. Director Hyams, also the film's cinematographer, is great at constructing stunning chiaroscuro tableau out of relatively drab sports stadium backrooms but, simultaneously, reveals a complete disinterest in the human stresses that might exist between two terrified combatants. That the closest Sudden Death gets to your standard martial arts throw-down features Van Damme uselessly kicking away at a heavily padded sports mascot seems to underline the deliberate physical ineffectiveness of his character. Generously, this tracks pleasantly with an absurdly contrived (but thoroughly entertaining) interlude in which McCord must step out on to the rink and pose as the Penguins' goalie. Massively out of his depth, despite arm-chair critiques that are repeated to the players by his son, Van Damme's stressed pleading contrasts nicely with the high-speed puck play barreling towards him.