Jean-Claude Van Damme vs. Ralph Fiennes
Since I'm talkin' about the Muscles of Brussels, let me tell you about my last encounter with Van Damme.
Adrienne and I - this was when we were in Maine - had just had an evening with a friend which ended with us talking about the movie The English Patient. The English Patient is, of course, widely recognized to be a great movie but we hadn't seen it. It is also widely recognized to be a depressing movie. So we decided to do a double-feature! An English Patient/Cyborg double feature! Cyborg is some horrible martial arts movie that Jean-Claude Van Damme made in the 80s, I believe.
Well, we saw The English Patient. It is a great movie with lots of great performances, including Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes (aka "the good Fiennes brother", hehe). It is also a fairly long and quite depressing movie. Afterwards, we watched Cyborg.
It's a terrible movie. One of the worst. It has Van Damme as some post-apocalyptic soldier-of-fortune with a troubled backstory who is trying to get a robot past some sub-Road Warrior goons to save the world or something like that. There's a chick and kid that remind him of his troubled backstory, predictably the same gang that's trying to stop him, now, is the one who murdered his family in his troubled backstory. Van Damme's character is crucified and reborn in righteousness. No joke. The story of Jesus Christ is plundered for the sake of a cut-rate sci-fi martial arts movie . . . how many times is that? Anyway, the final combat takes place thirty years after the nuclear holocaust that destroyed the bulk of civilization, yet the cars are still on fire. In the rain. Yeah. Seriously, the cars are burning in the rain. Well, the hero and villain scream at each other, show their chiseled torsos glistening with rainwater and throw many kicks while screaming. Burning cars in the rain and screaming. With kicks.
In the end, the post-apocalyptic gang of murderous thugs is defeated and the world is saved. Or something. I dunno. It didn't make any fucking sense. Even as sci-fi martial arts movies go, it was really bad. Even the stuff that they should have gotten right they didn't, there was almost no sense at all of Van Damme's considerable physical ability. The acting was hideous, the effects - insofar as they can be called effects - were worse, the script laughable and the direction absent. There is nothing good about this movie! It was an attempt to cash in on the success and popularity of The Terminator, a cheap and crass quickie kick flick meant meant to feed the popularity of humanoid robots in the Governator age. But it did that thing that bad movies sometimes do. It drove through awful and came out the other side funny. The movie with it's Christ-like allusions, industrial wasteland sets and deep seriousness come together to create something surprisingly amusing, at least on the far end of the two-and-a-half hour angstfest that is The English Patient.
So, curiously, the double-feature worked pretty well. We were able to appreciate The English Patient without having the heavy mood all evening!
Adrienne and I - this was when we were in Maine - had just had an evening with a friend which ended with us talking about the movie The English Patient. The English Patient is, of course, widely recognized to be a great movie but we hadn't seen it. It is also widely recognized to be a depressing movie. So we decided to do a double-feature! An English Patient/Cyborg double feature! Cyborg is some horrible martial arts movie that Jean-Claude Van Damme made in the 80s, I believe.
Well, we saw The English Patient. It is a great movie with lots of great performances, including Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes (aka "the good Fiennes brother", hehe). It is also a fairly long and quite depressing movie. Afterwards, we watched Cyborg.
It's a terrible movie. One of the worst. It has Van Damme as some post-apocalyptic soldier-of-fortune with a troubled backstory who is trying to get a robot past some sub-Road Warrior goons to save the world or something like that. There's a chick and kid that remind him of his troubled backstory, predictably the same gang that's trying to stop him, now, is the one who murdered his family in his troubled backstory. Van Damme's character is crucified and reborn in righteousness. No joke. The story of Jesus Christ is plundered for the sake of a cut-rate sci-fi martial arts movie . . . how many times is that? Anyway, the final combat takes place thirty years after the nuclear holocaust that destroyed the bulk of civilization, yet the cars are still on fire. In the rain. Yeah. Seriously, the cars are burning in the rain. Well, the hero and villain scream at each other, show their chiseled torsos glistening with rainwater and throw many kicks while screaming. Burning cars in the rain and screaming. With kicks.
In the end, the post-apocalyptic gang of murderous thugs is defeated and the world is saved. Or something. I dunno. It didn't make any fucking sense. Even as sci-fi martial arts movies go, it was really bad. Even the stuff that they should have gotten right they didn't, there was almost no sense at all of Van Damme's considerable physical ability. The acting was hideous, the effects - insofar as they can be called effects - were worse, the script laughable and the direction absent. There is nothing good about this movie! It was an attempt to cash in on the success and popularity of The Terminator, a cheap and crass quickie kick flick meant meant to feed the popularity of humanoid robots in the Governator age. But it did that thing that bad movies sometimes do. It drove through awful and came out the other side funny. The movie with it's Christ-like allusions, industrial wasteland sets and deep seriousness come together to create something surprisingly amusing, at least on the far end of the two-and-a-half hour angstfest that is The English Patient.
So, curiously, the double-feature worked pretty well. We were able to appreciate The English Patient without having the heavy mood all evening!