By Joe Bendel. In 2010, former Interpol President Jackie Selebi of South Africa was convicted on corruption charges. Two hired killers will learn there is considerably more illegal skullduggery going on at that international law enforcement agency in Ernie Barbarash’s Assassination Games, which opens this today in regions of the country that can get behind a straight forward action beat-down.
Assassins do not often forge friendly rivalries. Taciturn Vincent Brazil does not have friends, period. However, he finds himself working with the highly motivated Roland Flint to take out Eastern European mobster Polo Yakur. Brazil only wants to fulfill the million dollar contract Interpol secretly put on his head. Flint wants revenge for his wife Anna, who suffered severe brain damage at the hands of Yakur and his thugs.
It is not that simple though. Interpol released Yakur from prison to deliberately flush out Flint, their former contract killer of choice, who now knows too much. The international bureaucrats are even willing to team-up with the Euro Jabba the Hutt to take out their former man Flint. Further complicating matters, Brazil’s aborted first attempt claims the life of Yakur’s brother, leaving the gangster somewhat out of sorts. As a result, there will be a lot of double-crossing and revenge taking in AG.
At one point, Flint and Brazil engage in some absolutely brutal hand-to-hand combat, yet walk away unfazed as reluctant partners. Frankly, it is rather cool to see a film like this again. AG is much like the relatively ambitious action B-movies Van Damme made on his way up (who can resist Bloodsport when it pops up on cable?). In fact, Barbarash and cinematographer Phil Parmet give it a legitimately stylish look, nicely exploiting the faded grandeur of their Bucharest locations.
Playing to his strength, the Belgian Van Damme portrays Brazil with ice cold detachment up until the very end. Conversely, British martial arts star Scott Adkins seethes like a madman as Flint, often looking like he could fry an egg on his forehead. Indeed, it is rather a good pairing. For the hardcore fan, Adkins might have more street cred these days – but regardless, the two action stars certainly know how acquit themselves in a fight scene. (They are both rumored to be in the running for the prospective Expendables 2, as well.) Perhaps AG’s coolest turn though comes from Andrew French as Brazil’s suavely duplicitous business agent, Nalbandian. The film is also something of a family affair for Van Damme, with his daughter Bianca Van Varenberg in the thankless role of comatose Anna Flint and his son Kristopher Van Varenberg trying to kill the old man as one of the crooked Interpol henchmen.
If not revolutionary, AG is a super-slick retro-action blast. However, depicting an intergovernmental agency like Interpol in such villainous terms is somewhat bold. Even the upcoming UN peacekeeping drama The Whistleblower largely cops out, shifting its outrage to a fictional Blackwater-like security contractor in a feat of cinematic jujitsu. Of course, AG is really just about beating the snot out of bad guys, which Adkins and Van Damme do quite well. Recommended for nostalgic action movie viewers and Adkins’ fans, AG opens today (7/29) in Miami, Charlotte, the Mall of America, and cities across Texas.
Posted on July 29th, 2011 at 8:56am.
Actually Dyncorp the contractor featured in The Whistleblower is a real company. Some of their employees were apparently really involved in that child prostitution scandal in Bosnia.
http://www.dyn-intl.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DynCorp
I haven’t seen The Whistleblower, so I have no clue how fair the portrayal of Dyncorp is in that film.
I haven’t seen The Whistleblower, so I have no clue how fair the portrayal of the UN is in that film.
And I haven’t seen Assassination Games, so I have no clue how fair the portrayal of Interpol is in that film.
I love van Damme, and I guess it’s just as well that he chose not to go artsy-fartsy after a few shockingly good performances in JCVD and Wake of Death. The man evidently just wants to entertain us with kick-ass, and that’s more than alright with me.
My two cents is that van Damme’s movies – the defining early ones anyway – tend to have very straightforward (what we today would call simplistic) moral themes: honor your family, honor your sensei, honor yourself, and be willing to fight for such honor (Kickboxer, Bloodsport, and Lionheart in that regard form a kind of triptych; that’s how I’ve always thought of them, somewhat playfully). There’s not much more to be analyzed or said about them than that, which is not at all necessarily a bad thing.
There’s also something frankly refreshing today about such resolute focus on personal morality to the exclusion of virtually any political messaging. So many critics never could grasp this point – it wasn’t just the ass-kicking that made us love these films in the 80’s and early 90’s, but as well the universal human connection to a guy sacrificing himself for his impoverished and fatherless niece (Lionheart), his humiliated and paralyzed brother (Kickboxer), his surrogate father and teacher (Bloodsport)… We can all touch those motivations rather easily, and then – bonus! – we can indulge in the vicarious thrill of kicking ass to execute our sense of duty. In short: violence yes, but nobility too.
Put it like this: Has Darren Aronofsky ever hit on nobility, even by accident? Follow this contrast between JCVD and Aronofsky out and one could get a pretty good picture of the moral compass currently deranging the yawning caverns of film critics’ brains. The simple nobility of routine action films is denigrated as bloodlust; the bloodlust of nihilism is hailed as a triumph of the human spirit. I’m not sure we’d be better off with a market dominated by JCVD-type action films, but we sure as hell wouldn’t be worse off.
Anyhow, thanks for bothering to note and review van Damme’s latest. And thanks especially for not viewing it as “beneath” you as a critic to do so. The lone van Damma fan at Libertas (yours truly) appreciates it.
We have no problem giving van Damme some love here. Love the dig at Aronofsky, btw! I never thought I’d hear his name and van Damme’s in the same sentence!
“The simple nobility of routine action films is denigrated as bloodlust; the bloodlust of nihilism is hailed as a triumph of the human spirit.”
That’s a really good line. I’m stealing it for my facebook status update! Jason, get him writing some Van Damme reviews for the site!