Pound of Flesh (3/10): Van Damme in search of his abducted kidney

“What I’m really good at is killing.”

We all know what Jean-Claude Van Damme is really good at, it’s his amazing stunt work and despite his age he continues to be in great physical form. Honestly the only film I’d seen him in after the 90’s was The Expendables 2 and he was one of the only redeemable characters in that film. He made over a dozen films since the last time I had seen him in the first Universal Soldier sequel which was about the moment I lost interest in his work. I grew up enjoying his performances in movies like Bloodsport, Kickboxer, Lionheart, and Universal Soldier, but after that his body of work got very repetitive. I don’t know why I decided to check out Pound of Flesh considering it has been an eternity since I’ve seen him in a starring role and the film hasn’t received any love from critics or audiences, but I guess I just wanted to see if he was doing anything different. I’m sure the nostalgic factor also kicked in a bit. 

The film opens with Van Damme waking up in a hotel room naked in a bathtub full of ice. I was immediately reminded of the scene in Universal Soldier and I kind of guessed from the second the story began that this was going to be just another Van Damme vehicle. We get some strange flashbacks (done with cheap effects) where he recalls spending the night with a woman he had saved and everything begins to come back to him slowly. He was drugged by this woman (Charlotte Peters) and now he discovers that his kidney has been removed. The first thing Deacon does is call an old friend, Kung (Aki Aleong), who immediately shows up to offer his assistance. This is where we are told Deacon is in the Philippines visiting his brother, George (John Ralston), and Kung insists that he let things go considering the black market is very dangerous in the region. Deacon will not let it go because the reason for his visit was to donate his kidney to his dying niece. So the quest for his missing kidney begins as he decides to return to the bar where he met the woman and try to connect things from there on. Darren Shahlavi plays the villain who will do what it takes to keep Deacon off his tracks.  

With a few exceptional moments where Van Damme gets to use his martial art abilities and prove he can still split his legs, Pound of Flesh is incredibly dull and cringeworthy. The dialogue in this film is incredibly stupid and Aleong’s character is only introduced to explain the situation and to give us some background on who Deacon is. The film is basically a conventional revenge film with a low production value and some absurd revelations. The pacing of the film dragged whenever they tried to force the relationship between the two brothers which wasn’t interesting despite the fact that the story depended on it to build the tension. I think I’ve already written too much about a film that never put any effort into trying to deliver a quality revenge film.     

My Review: The Expendables 2 (4/10)

"Track him, find him, kill him."

The Expendable 2 is a ridiculous and over the top action film that tries to connect with the audience through nostalgic action scenes and cheesy one liners. Teaming these great action stars from the 80's was a great idea and appealed to us in the first Expendables because we hadn't seen these actors do anything interesting in a long time, but in the sequel that novelty is gone and it felt like a complete embarrassment seeing these once great and talented actors working with such a lazy and predictable script. These action films full of testosterone kind of have the same appeal for men that Katherine Heigl's films have for women. Not even director Simon West who has made some decent action films in the past couldn't save this film from becoming such a train wreck. I really enjoyed Con Air and thought The Mechanic was entertaining, but this has to be one of his weakest efforts as a director. There are so many cheesy lines and dialogues in this film that it's not even funny. Arnold Schwarzenegger repeats his "I'll be back" line from Terminator like three times, Bruce Willis tells Arnold "You've been terminated," and several more lines that try to appeal to our memory of those great films of the past. I think that it was a great idea to reunite these guys for one movie, but a sequel was completely unnecessary.

The team from the first film is back with Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone) leading the guns for hire crew which consists of Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Yin Yang (Jet Li), Gunnar (Dolph Lundgren), Hale Caesar (Terry Crews), and Toll Road (Randy Couture).  Barney hires some fresh blood for their next mission, former US soldier Billy (Liam Hemsworth), who everyone pretty much calls the Kid. CIA agent Church (Bruce Willis) hires the men for a simple mission that consists of retrieving something from a crashed plane in Asia. He assigns his assistant, Maggie (Nan Yu) to go with them and bring back the device they are looking for. The mission goes wrong when some men are waiting for them at the crash site and take The Kid hostage forcing them to drop their weapons and give them the device they've come to retrieve. Vilain (Jean Claude Van Damme) takes the device and the Expendables are forced to regroup in order to face Vilain and his team known as The Sangs. 

In my opinion the best thing about The Expendables 2 are the two new additions: Jean Claude Van Damme as the villain and Chuck Norris who has a couple of cameos. The scenes with Chuck Norris are hilarious as he plays along with the famous internet memes about him. He mentions how once a cobra bit him in the dessert and after five days in agonizing pain the cobra died. The Expendables does play a lot with the stereotypes of each actor and the films that made them famous, but the action scenes aren't worth saving this movie. There is nothing unique or original about this film, we've seen it all before with much better scripts. This film is so predictable that you could tell everything that was going to happen. It is just a lazy repeat of the 80's action genre films. The self deprecating jokes didn't really work for me.