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. 

Replicant

Jean-Claude Van Damme, already no stranger to inhabiting dual roles within his films, gets to play two extremely different takes on the same man in director Ringo Lam's Replicant. Firstly, as a greasy haired serial killer who beats young mothers to death with twirling kicks, before setting them and their homes on fire. Secondly, as a freshly hatched clone of this murderer, cooked up by the American government and suffering through intense flashbacks of outrages that this photostat man did not commit. Michael Rooker is on-hand as the cop investigating these slayings, forgoing his nautical retirement plans to babysit the childlike version of Van Damme. Despite this copy never having harmed anyone (well, a few irritating G-men aside), Rooker's Detective Riley largely treats the film's second Van Damme horribly: handcuffing him to any stray pipes; pushing and prodding this simple-minded man to stand before bulletin boards teeming with charred bodies; and even battering away at him with the flimsiest of provocation. Although their connection does (eventually) skew in an unconvincingly paternal direction, Riley's first instinct is to seize on this opportunity to bully and browbeat a reduced reproduction of his quarry. That the fully-realised Van Damme character, known as The Torch, seems to be choosing victims based on their willingness to be brusque with their children in public seems to mean something but the faulty parenthood framing is a stray note rather than a full-on symphony. Since this is a Van Damme film, entire sequences revolve around his boyish, Airwalk wearing clone winning the heart of a working girl by prematurely ejaculating in his sweats then beating up her pimp. And, since this is also a Ringo Lam film, we are treated to an all-time demolition derby, featuring Rooker and the evil Van Damme squabbling over a seat belt in an out-of-control ambulance that strikes every single stationary car and light fixture in a multi-story car park. 

Guile (Jean-Claude Van Damme) by Hungry Clicker

Universal Soldier: The Return

Jean-Claude Van Damme is back as Luc Deveraux. Universal Soldier's reanimated infantryman has beaten back the spectre of death and is now living as a regular, boring human with a job and a family (presumably a mortgage too). He's overcome the kill-bot programming written on top of his former personality, as well as the incessant need to ice himself down. Deveraux's a new man then. Quite how the pointedly deceased grunt has been able to transition from a walking, rotting corpse to a working stiff isn't covered here in any great detail. Who cares right? Mic Rodger's film certainly doesn't. Van Damme's got faces to pull and stunt men to kick.

Universal Soldier: The Return tosses off any idea of physical or psychological rehabilitation for Deveraux. The character is stripped of all the emotional depth you'd expect from someone who has been friendly fired, returned to life as an automaton, then had to fight through the military's multi-tiered murder coding to stake a claim on his own, lapsed humanity. Gone too is the stability promised by Ally Walker's Veronica Roberts, Deveraux's love interest in the previous film. The spunky reporter has died off-screen, leaving Luc with an accident-prone daughter he barely frets about. It's a lot of circuitous, disappointing corrections upfront just to position Van Damme as a mugging action figure with a pronounced interest in female nudity. Seriously, Deveraux doesn't just go cross-eyed staring at his exposed, fitness model colleague Kiana Tom, the entire plot hinges on his familiarity with Internet strip shows. 

Deveraux, despite being chewed-up, spat out, then chewed up again by the US government, is currently working alongside the next generation of UniSols in some ill-defined PR / scab role. The lumpy, grotesquely muscled zombies, as exemplified by pro-wrestling's own Bill Goldberg, all seem to loathe their human attache, attacking him at every available opportunity. Any notion that this enmity might be grounded in the cold storage lads resenting Deveraux's freedom to leave their air-conditioned mausoleum and father children isn't even on Return's radar. Mic Rodgers' film is content to chug along, monotonously drawing husky men together so that they can pulverise barely dressed sets while the audience suffer through Static-X tracks.

Universal Soldier

Universal Soldier's finest moments are fleeting but indelible; brief blips revolving around Dolph Lundgren's zapped-out, reanimated war criminal. Despite the film's horrific conceit - dead 'Nam veterans are resurrected as automated meat shields then used to defuse hostage situations - director Roland Emmerich is much more excited about presenting his stars as muscled intruders, upsetting gormless locals with their loud, pneumatic behaviour. These wildly disparate ideas only really knit together in one scene, and it's all thanks to the ear-collecting mania that Lundgren invests in his Sergeant Andrew Scott.

Following an unsuccessful, not to mention incompetent, attempt to capture or eliminate Jean-Claude Van Damme's Luc Deveraux, Scott is lumbered with several chewed-up, unresponsive underlings. In order to function effectively these souped-up stiffs must be kept on ice, leaving Scott no alternative but to drag these mushy comrades around a supermarket in search of cold storage. Scott screams at vacant shoppers and shelf-stackers, demanding they point him towards the nearest walk-in freezer. Once his men are dumped in a meat locker, Scott returns to the shop floor to hold court, ranting and raving to a stunned, schlubby audience about the 'treachery' of the South Vietnamese.

Lundgren's performance defies the neglect of Richard Rothstein, Christopher Leitch, and Dean Devlin's screenplay, motoring along entirely on the actor's raw, babbling enthusiasm. It is to Emmerich's credit that he, quite apparently, just got out of the way. Lundgren shrieks and booms, mispronouncing words then taking rote tough guy talk off in new, incomprehensible directions. Comparatively, Luc Deveraux's reawakening is a slow process, prickled then catalysed by the sameness of the situations he finds himself in. Van Damme portrays his enlightenment as a kind of rebirth, resetting Deveraux to an innocent, almost childlike state. The film leverages this into farcical situations designed to exploit Van Damme's boyish good looks and willingness (or outright desire) to disrobe.

Lundgren gets much more to chew on then. Scott, it seems, broke his programming much earlier than Deveraux, happy to play along with the military-industrial complex's latest bone-headed scheme simply because it gave him ample opportunity to brutalise people. Out on his first (screen) mission Scott, referred to by his undead call-sign GR13, is set the task of silently eliminating a posted guard. While Van Damme's GR44 heroically punches his quarry unconscious, GR13 twists his guy's head off then stamps on the prone, dead body. Universal Soldier proposes a war between a reluctant professional and a raving lunatic but then gets lost along the way, delaying the expected collision and invincible flesh conceit to amble along sex-comedy side roads that don't actually lead anywhere.

In Hell

Reading a synopsis of Ringo Lam's final collaboration with Jean-Claude Van Damme you might come away thinking that In Hell is about your standard prison fighting tournament, the muscles from Brussels stomping progressively larger, more crazed inmates for our buzzed-up entertainment. While that isn't a million miles from the truth, this isn't a Cannon film and Ringo Lam isn't a Cannon director. In Hell is a mutant, a squalid straight-to-video thriller that leans far more on Van Damme's sombre acting abilities and fading star persona than his high-kicking gymnastics.

Van Damme plays Kyle LeBlanc, an American serving a life sentence in a Russian prison / meat grinder for executing the man who raped then murdered his wife. LeBlanc may be determined and forthright but he isn't a karate killer, the confrontations he seeks in the early passages of the film aren't about building up an idea of an unbeatable fighter, they're the desperate actions of a broken man who wants to be thrown away. These pointedly unsuccessful scuffles land him in solitary confinement, a sewage outlet that doubles as a cell, giving him the time and space he needs to retreat completely into his thoughts, fantasising a different life, one in which he and his wife are still together.

When the film's gears shift, thrusting Van Damme into the exercise yard cockfights staged for the amusement of the guards, what follows isn't treated as a triumphant plot development. The violence fundamentally alters LeBlanc. His dream life, his soft interior, is abandoned in favour of an obsessive exercise regimen, stoked by the hate radiating from his cellmate, the glowering Inmate 451, played by Lawrence Taylor. Finding his romantic humanity completely incompatible with his current, nightmarish environment, LeBlanc willingly hardens himself, transforming his body and perspective into that of machinery. In combat he's a slobbering monster, built to break. Away, he becomes a sacrificial calf, willing to suffer to unite the working, criminal classes against their tormentors.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1990s - Death Warrant

As the collective headache of the 1980s buzzed on into the 1990s, all the plugged-in action stars were considering the cinematic possibilities of the jail stretch, perhaps in an effort to capture the momentary cultural interest created by a failing war on drugs and a burgeoning, for-profit prison industry. Schwarzenegger got in early, making his Stephen King adaptation bones too, with The Running Man. Stallone fired back with the middling, would-be heartfelt Lock Up, while Jackie Chan faded into the incarcerated ensemble of Island of Fire.

Death Warrant, by dint of being a by-the-numbers example of this action sub-genre, offers an interesting comparison point for Jean-Claude Van Damme as a leading man. With a well-worn set of expectations in place, it's easier to see what it is exactly that Van Damme brings to the table. Martial arts are an obvious addition, largely confined to a bruise 'em up finale that has Van Damme kicking a supernatural opponent around and into a blazing furnace. Less expected is the unpretentious sensitivity the actor brings to every single interaction.

Van Damme's Detective Burke likes to touch, to reach out and make a connection, not always to injure either. The character displays an atypical gentleness when dealing with other male inmates. When Robert Guillaume's hard-won ally catches a debilitating injury not only does Burke delicately treat his oozing wound, he touches the man on his face and pats his chest to reassure him. Above all, Van Damme exudes a confidence that suggest a man in complete command of his sexuality. This conviction melts women's hearts too. The film's love scenes between Van Damme and Cynthia Gibb's lawyer may stutter dramatically but there's no denying the fitful, jelly legged longing Gibb summons up for their big kiss.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1980s - Cyborg: Director's Cut / Slinger

Although not in the same league as a full-on control freak like Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme was nevertheless given plenty of opportunity to put his own authorial stamp on his 1980s releases. Following a disastrous test screening for Bloodsport, The Cannon Group allowed the star to supervise the film's re-edit - how much worse could it get? Healthy box office returns ensured that this benefit was soon extended to the rest of the company's collaborations with the actor, including 1989's Cyborg. To give him his due, Van Damme had a clear and consistent methodology when assembling all of these features: they are vehicles for his body to be pored over and admired. Plot concerns rank a distant second.

Slinger is Albert Pyun's attempt to reconstruct his vision of Cyborg, freed from studio notes and a film star who jealously guarded his brand. Thanks to a diligent collaborator, Pyun had an 88 minute VHS workprint to excavate anything absent from the theatrical release. Newly recorded voice overs and dialogue loops were used to paper over missing or unfilmed scenes, framing a story that diverges on several key details. Objectives are more clearly delineated in this alternative cut, characters act with specific, stated purpose. The analog video assembly also predates any MPAA censorship, giving Pyun one or two more instances of violence to grab attention with.

This Director's Cut doesn't simply rescue a preexisting piece, it goes further with Pyun adding and subtracting from his film, eagerly working towards an impressionistic draft that simulates what could have been, had he been allowed full creative control and a greater financial freedom. In terms of form, it's clear from this new edit that Pyun wanted to hold on his images longer, to let them sink into his audience and expand in their minds. Lacking the coverage to actually amplify these moments, Pyun switches back and forth between the blotchy, deteriorating analog signal and a pristine theatrical source, effectively replaying the beat. In truly dire editorial predicaments he simply turns what little footage he has into self-contained loops.

These primitive techniques, coupled with an excretable epilogue sequence, threaten to shake the viewer out of the film but, thankfully, Slinger has one more ace up its sleeve, Tony Riparetti and Jim Saad's brand new soundtrack. Indeed, this Director's Cut is an object lesson in how much of an impact music can have on a film. As released, Cyborg was saddled with a reedy, synthetic score by Kevin Bassinson. Despite the striking apocalyptic imagery, the audio accompaniment was painfully low rent, a supermarket keyboard's approximation of an orchestra, piped out to tinnily underscore the futuristic action. By comparison, Riparetti and Saad's suite is a blazing catalyst, full of wailing, heroic guitars and the kind of pounding, electronic beats Chu Ishikawa wove into the Tetsuo films.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1980s - Cyborg

One of the more intriguing ideas in Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog (adapted for the screen in 1975 by LQ Jones) is that cinema-going has survived into the wasteland, taking the form of mouldy old pornography - these snippets projected up on shattered walls to placate the roaming gangs of shell-shocked rapists. In that scenario film explicitly functions as escapism, providing a glimpse of the soft female bodies denied to that world's gibbering, starving men. Albert Pyun's Cyborg goes one better, imagining the kind of art that a society coping with an extinction event might actually produce. Cyborg is monosyllabic and cruel; its characters defeated.

Despite being named for Dayle Haddon's automaton and starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Cyborg's most important character is Vincent Klyn's Fender. The film opens with his narration, filling the audience in on the catastrophes that have facilitated Fantasy II's meticulously detailed establishing shots. Fender enjoys this new milieu, the rampant lawlessness allowing him to grow into his psychosis and actually thrive. While the weak hole up in the rubble, Fender and his gang of bodybuilders crash over the ruins, gobbling up anything or anyone that takes their fancy. Pyun can't help but betray his allegiance in these moments. Klyn's face is framed in a series of extreme close-ups, the actor's eyes blazing while he preaches his apocalyptic nihilism directly to the audience. Cyborg belongs to Fender.

Cyborg is subsistence filmmaking. Sets and costumes inherited from a cancelled Masters of the Universe sequel, the shoot itself costing a quarter of the pre-production outlay for that failed He-Man project. Van Damme plays Gibson, a post-apocalyptic mercenary who takes his payment in canned goods. This destitution is reflected in the stark, basic plotting. There's a listless quality to the film, a pervading sense that everything is being made up on the spot. Probably because it was. Cyborg motors on a baggy, improvised game of chase, complete with a viciousness that reflects a population who have grown up insular and surrounded by extreme violence.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1980s - Kickboxer

Unlike say Bloodsport and its all-American superman Frank Dux, Kickboxer revolves around a character that will be visibly grow before our eyes. Jean-Claude Van Damme's Kurt Sloane has the basics in terms of an ability to hurl his leg out and, thanks to his brother's career ending injury at the hands (and elbows) of Muay Thai legend Tong Po, the drive to push himself beyond his limits. This is the hook that keeps the film ticking over. Bloodsport had to invent and repeat personal stakes to drum up interest in Dux. Kickboxer casts that kind of prefab character aside to laser in on the underachiever boiling by his side.

While Kickboxer does throw in a tasteless, late-in-the-day sexual assault to remind dimmer bulbs that bad guy Po is a real piece of shit, they needn't have bothered. The entire film has kept teenage boys of all ages invested by always tracking towards a clear, aspirational goal. The taste in Kickboxer is how Kurt's transformation is handled, it's The Karate Kid with some queasy hang-ups about Thailand and a firm nod towards deliberate bodily destruction folded in. With the latter in mind, the key moment in Kickboxer occurs early on. Backstage, prepping for his brother's disastrous fight, Sloane stumbles upon Po drilling his legs, silently kicking an enormous concrete beam over and over again. Sloane reacts with horror. He's seen something massive and terrifying - a man so completely numb and mechanical that he can make himself less yielding than support architecture.

Kickboxer charts Sloane's progress from a glorified whipping boy to someone who can perform similar feats. The film misses a trick by failing to tie Van Damme's eventual success to these moments of tibia calcification though - ideally Sloane should prove his dominance by shattering Tong Po's invincible leg or, at the very least, withstanding a greater degree of punishment than his opponent. A mid-film fight between Sloane and an underling in which the two of them trade and withstand each other's kicks is a more satisfying application of the bloody-mindedness Van Damme has immersed himself in than some smoke-filled temple fight designed to evoke a savage otherness the filmmakers have decided to apply to Thailand.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1980s - Black Eagle

Despite the video shop real estate given over to the actor, Jean-Claude Van Damme is not the main attraction in Black Eagle. That poisoned chalice belongs to Sho Kosugi, star of umpteen Cannon Group ninja films and one of the more detestable Bruceploitation films, Bruce Lee Fights Back from The Grave. Kosugi is an interesting character though, a Japanese karate champion turned actor who treats this film (and apparently every other one) as an extended opportunity to take his children to work.

Kosugi plays Ken Tani, a CIA super agent able to code-switch between an unassuming, hunched academic and his lithe, knife wielding super-identity The Black Eagle. Tani has completely dedicated his life to protecting the aims and ideals of the United States, asking only that he be granted an annual fortnight of peace and quiet to hang out with his two sons. Naturally Uncle Sam reneges on this promise, packing Tani and his kids off to Malta to visit art museums but also stalk nosy Russian trawlers.

Since the focus is off him, Van Damme only gets a few, brief chances for his Soviet heavy to capture our attention. As ever, the actor is happy to disrobe, performing his trademark splits in various states of undress. As the film trundles on, there's an emerging sense that director Eric Karson doesn't quite know what to do with either actor. Kosugi and Van Damme are shot at arm's length, all the better to capture the holiday destination environments.

Karson and Cinematographer George Koblasa do dream up a few fun shots, their best portraying Van Damme as a kind of muscle piston pumping through a well-oiled routine. His body is pored over and objectified; overpowering brawn glimpsed in a canted, low-angle appraisal. Karson and pals also swipe a few of the tricks Robert Clouse demonstrated on Enter the Dragon, ignoring the moments when stabbing heels meet vulnerable throats to focus on the deranged glee surging over the face of the striker.

Opportunities to delight in this destruction are few and far between though. Black Eagle moves with all the vim of a tourist nursing sunstroke. Malta's blazing Mediterranean heat has been baked into the film, dictating not only the sleepy onscreen performances but also the film's baggy, undisciplined shape. Stakes crash into the film, delivered with all the elegance of a brick being placed into a malfunctioning blender. The film is pitched like a classic 70s Euro thriller, selling adult intrigue with brief blips of adrenalised action. Instead you get an illogical bore that lurches slowly from sequence to sequence, never quite managing to work up a head of steam.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1980s - Bloodsport

Frank Dux is a very interesting person. As well as being a super important ex-CIA agent and a noted ninja historian, Black Belt magazine favourite Mr Dux spent the late seventies fighting in hundreds of underground, full-contact martial arts matches before retiring completely undefeated. Contrary to what the Los Angeles Times would have you believe, these entirely credible events definitely happened. Dux's stories so impressed Cannon Group moguls Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan that they stumped up the cash to turn his life story into a film.

Macho fantasist Dux found his perfect big screen avatar in Jean-Claude Van Damme, both men defined by their desire to be regarded as some sort of exciting object. Dux used tall tales to attract gullible marks to his ninjustsu McDojos. Van Damme, thanks to disastrous test screenings that deemed an early assembly unwatchable, was given carte blanche to edit the rhythms and shape of Bloodsport around centrefold spreads of his muscled physique.

Schwarzenegger's frame was oversized and lightly comical, his brawn presented as the machinery required to become a human gun platform. Stallone was smaller but steely, his body a work-in-progress that seemed to be unconsciously stressing the flayed elegance of rejected messiahs. Compared to his peers, Van Damme's mission is simple. He wants to be appraised and desired, explicitly linking glimpses of his engorged figure with the the act of sex. Van Damme fucks women and he wants you to know it. Viewed in this context, Bloodsport's fights are more about the graceful slow-motion arc of a perfectly chiselled leg than any sense of genuine conflict.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1980s - No Retreat No Surrender

Whereas a film like The Karate Kid is interested in self-determination and how men at different stages in their life can have positive emotional impacts on each other, No Retreat No Surrender is literally about how cool it'd be if your Bruce Lee poster came to life and anointed you, some crummy white kid, to be his successor. Kurt McKinney plays Jason Stillwell, an LA import who spends his days in Seattle creeping around The Little Dragon's grave and rolling his eyes at his pacifist / coward father.

Director Corey Yuen, a Peking Opera School classmate of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, has fun undermining the staid drilling of Emerald City karate with the kind of fluid but punishing training regimens made famous by Shaw Brothers' The 36th Chamber of Shaolin or Seasonal Films stablemate Drunken Master. The not-too-subtle insinuation being that flexible China produces more complete fight forms than prissy old Japan. Although Yuen's raw, onscreen materials are slower and sloppier than his Hong Kong pals, the director assembles a few crisp exchanges, particularly towards the end of the film.

Predictably, Jean-Claude Van Damme is this (basically terrible) film's greatest asset, an allegedly Russian enforcer who chews up and spits out the film's irritating extended cast in a concluding martial arts tournament. Given about ten minutes of screentime, Van Damme is instantly able to communicate the defining characteristics of his star persona - an arrogance based in absolute ability. There's a real sense of pitilessness with Van Damme, you believe he loathes anyone he considers weaker than him. He's also exciting to watch, a wide-eyed lunatic with a hairstyle held with polyurethane, hurling out leg upon leg at the blubbering nothings who dare challenge him.

HUNTER

Steve Johnson describes the miserable few days Van Damme spent cooped up in a bug-eyed, red insect suit on the set of Predator.

The Expendables 2

I was quite fond of The Expendables. Sylvester Stallone's 80s action mega-mix neatly juggled a reductive police action plot, with some gonzo character moments. Each actor appeared to be playing an amped up version of themselves: Stallone was codgery but desperate to please; Statham, unlucky in love with beautiful brunettes; Jet Li working overtime to support two families; Stone Cold Steve Austin quite happy to strike a woman. It was a film with a pro-wrestling mindset, turning up personality tics and tricks against a backdrop of Commie stomping and big government mistrust. All that and Sly seemed to have spent hours cruising YouTube for bite sized attention grabbers to co-opt for the big screen. Expendables was a piece engaged with the type of viewer who delights at record breaking pistol reloads, or seeing an American twenty-somethings - who are pretending to be Russian - chopping up the landscape with their latest combat shotgun. It was crass and shallow, but betrayed a slathering, uncompromising affection for also-ran 80s thugs and their modern equivalents.

The Expendables 2 takes a different tact, perhaps trying to recontextualise the sappy, barely reconstructed personas that Sly and the gang struggled with during the early 1990s. Stallone's doomed relationship with a perky surrogate son pokes at the same mutant identity areas as the last film, but the execution is clumsy. The film plays like a TV movie, with a plot better suited to a modern-day A-Team pilot than an all-in genre stomp. Director Simon West lets the Planet Hollywood trifecta burn screen time cracking gentle jokes in static set-ups whilst Jason Statham is relegated to one tiny feature thump - a knife ninja remix of Clint Eastwood's entrance in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.

The rest of the original cast get it worse. The wonderful Terry Crews is made to play second-fiddle (in the realm of enormous firearms) to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Li bails out after the first mission. Lundgren is a mere background player here, doomed to blow kisses at Stallone's future squeeze Yu Nan. The underdog charm of the first film is jettisoned then in favour of (fading) A-list indifference. It's fun to see Schwarzenegger marching forwards firing a Call of Duty gun without blinking, but it's a fleeting joy. The only person really trying is Jean-Claude Van Damme. His character, Jean Vilain, seems to be the only role still operating on the first film's private-life-as-action-reality premise. His sinewy, euro-trash arrogance perfectly suited to make adversarial moves against Stallone's dull macho internalism. For all its faults Expendables 2 is one of the few films that really taps into Van Damme's dickish, sport shagger appeal. If we are to suffer an Expendables 3, Stallone would be well advised to seek assistance from some of the behind-the-scenes stars of 80s action cinema. I'm sure Steven E de Souza could knock up a suitably hyperbolic script for jailbird John McTiernan to direct.

DAY OF RECKONING

What is a special effect? Is it seeing a computer animated sequence of Iron Man's house falling off a cliffside whilst our hero struggles to free himself from the rubble? Or is it seeing Dolph Lundgren's wrinkly red face screaming directly into camera about self-determination? Is it more exciting when your brain experiences that tranquilised buzz you associate with CG, or when you see someone real locked into ludicrous? I submit that there's more juice in witnessing a shotgun fired a few inches above a man's hairline than a million missile merchandise helicopters. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning looks incredible. They should let John Hyams do a Terminator movie.

Heads up

NEVER ENDS

An underworld staffed by revolting reanimated war veterans? Van Dammage leading home invasions with a BIC'd head? A story that seems heavily indebted to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness? Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning? Fuck yeah!

Also Van Damme

Sylvester Stallone hands stewardship duties on The Expendables over to Simon West, a former Jerry Bruckheimer stable shooter who peaked with 1997's endlessly rewatchable Con Air. I've never felt like Mr West got his due for Con Air. The film is routinely heaped in with Michael Bay's usual one-note action sludge, despite having a sly self-awareness, and operating sense of humour. It resembles Bayhem, that's undeniable, but it has an ironic streak that'd have Michael scrunching his face up in confusion. Also Van Damme.

Ten Films 2010: Universal Soldier: Regeneration

A dour science-fiction nasty that operates on a pleasantly clipped shorthand. Specifically, machine men batter and brutalise each other against a derelict Soviet backdrop, their violence an atypically ugly MMA stomp. Jean-Claude Van Damme returns as a lined relic, kidnapped and doped up by panicking officials to face a rogue muscle monster with a pit bull mindset. Dolph Lundgren floats around as a confused clone, fixated on violent repetition, but unable to understand why. None of the heavily augmented soldiers display any recognisably human traits. Each is an automaton locked into their own distinct, mechanised predicament. Further to this, Van Damme's character doesn't triumph because of any underlining humanity, rather Deveraux is simply the most recently maintained - his performance supplemented by a battlefield deployed syringe of psychotropic amphetamines. Everyone in Universal Soldier: Regeneration is alien; no-one can be related to. These aren't men anymore, and the film knows this. It revels in it.

Universal Soldier: Regeneration

Emboldened by the goodwill generated by recent hit JCVD, and perhaps Sylvester Stallone's successful run of reboots, Jean-Claude Van Damme retreats to his only real franchise for a payday. In conception then Universal Soldier: Regeneration is worrying similar to 1999's stinker Universal Soldier: The Return: Van Damme as a lone super soldier battling a zeitgeist muscle man. Return saw Van Damme battling charmless WCW breeze block Bill Goldberg, whilst Regeneration pits the ageing star against Belarusian MMA fighter Andrei Arlovski. Thankfully, the similarities cease there. Whereas Return was a pocket money distraction for subnormal teenagers, Regeneration entertains ideas that form a credible meta-text about star personas.

Like Rambo, or even The Wrestler, Regeneration distils the appeal of its lead down to one idea, then ruthlessly delivers on it. Here, Van Damme is simply an efficient killing machine. No effort is expended to create any recognisable human traits or feelings for Van Damme's Luc Deveraux. The absence of character, is the character. This imposed limitation eliminates the need for any motivational downtime, as well as organically strengthening the hijacked man conceit. Deveraux isn't human anymore. He's a reanimated corpse, programmed to harm. Why should he have any drives other than his orders? In domestic scenes Van Damme is numb and zombielike. Drugged up and placed in the field though, he's a career best murderer, effortlessly driving long, prowling flashes of predatory knife play against shrieking stunt performers. Universal Soldier: Regeneration isn't about anything other than a group of emotionless machine-men beating each other to death in a utilitarian ruin. Quite right too.