An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really expecting much from this flick but, since it was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out anyway. I have to admit it, when I was a kid, I used to love these action flicks starring Jean-Claude Van Damme but that was more than 30 years ago and I don’t follow his work anymore (it doesn’t seem that I’m missing much). This movie was actually quite a milestone in Van Damme’s career as it was probably his last (fairly) high profile project. After that, pretty much everything he did would be direct-to-video releases only. Well, I wish I could say it was not bad but, unfortunately, it was pretty weak though. The first thing that annoyed me was the fact that the French characters didn’t speak French with each other and it was the same thing with the Russian characters. I mean, Van Damme and  Jean-Hugues Anglade both speak French, their characters were both French, so why on Earth did they speak English together? Even more problematic was the story though. Indeed, it was one of these convoluted ridiculous tales involving Van Damme playing a set of twins separated at birth and, well, it was pretty pathetic. His sidekick was this time Natasha Henstridge and I was surprised that it was only her 2nd movie after her breakthrough performance in ‘Species’. I was also surprised that she was only 22 years old at the time but, damned, she was just gorgeous back in those days. It’s too bad that she was such a weak actress and, together with Van Damme who barely could act at all through his whole career, it was rather cringe to behold. I have to admit that I’m not familiar with Ringo Lam’s work, it was actually his first US production, thanks to Van Damme, but I hope his Hong Kong movies are better than that. Anyway, to conclude, the damned thing was pretty weak and you should probably avoid it. 

5/10