Well, this movie is a tough one to rank. I mean any Jean Claude Van Damme movie isn't expected to be the next "Citizen Kane", so I should rate it based upon what it is trying to be: A decent martial arts / action movie. Still, this film has many flaws even by those standards, and I fear it was trying to be more than just an action film anyway. And what a boring, non-descriptive title it has. No one I know can ever quite remember it.

As an action film or a Jean Claude fan piece, it does pretty much fail. For one thing the story of Jean Claude discovering that he has an 'evil' brother that draws him into a life of crime and revenge was done just a few years earlier. By Himself!!! Isn't there an unwritten rule about doing a similar film within five years of one another? In this story, he plays a highly respected and decorated French police officer who is called to the scene where someone looking exactly like him is discovered dead after a long chase. Doing some investigation eventually reveals that this is his twin brother he never knew he had. It turns out that while he became a police officer, his brother became a high ranking member of the Russian Mafia. As we are watching Jean Claude slowly discover that his brother is a thief working for organized crime, I kept saying to myself, "just like in Double Impact!".

Almost all the fight scenes were very good ones, but martial arts fans expecting long drawn out battles will be disappointed. These were far more realistic than most modern martial arts films. You can see that Jean Claude is really struggling, which is something that most modern martial arts stars (like Steven Segall) never do. Some of the best fight scenes involved a very cool major enemy who kept popping up. We were never really sure which group he belonged too until the very end. Like all good villains, he almost had nothing to say and never even had a name. In the credits, he is only billed as 'Red Face' (played by Stefanos Miltsakakis), not that anyone referred to him in the film that way.

This was one of the first films to feature the Russian Mafia as a terrifying force. We had a lot of movies after this that featured them, but they seem to have gone out of style again. There are some scenes that try to set up the villains as real bad people, but none of them really worked. I would have liked to see a little more of their world (like we did with Japanese in "Rising Sun"), but no luck here.

There is also a love story in the film. The lead woman here is Natasha Henstridge, who will forever be known as "the naked chick from Species". This was the first film she made after "Species" came out, and all the advertisements on television and in the trailer actually said "the woman from Species" instead of saying her name. (Note: When she appeared on the show Southpark, the creators actually wanted to put that in the credits.) She isn't too bad here, but lets just say that her acting didn't challenge Jean Claude too much. The love story actually feels tacky because the relationship doesn't have a real feel to it. Not that I think the film was trying to give it one.

It really didn't have any major flaws about it, but it just felt drawn out. I don't mean it seemed a little longer than it should have; I mean EVERY scene seemed just a little bit too long. It was somewhat of a fascinating study in editing. I don't know if the movie would be any better if it were shorter, but it just didn't have the quick editing one usually expects from something advertised as an action film. The director, Ringo Lam, has only done Chinese action films both before and after this one. "City of Fire", which he directed, was the film Quentin Tarantino is consistently accused of copying to make "Reservoir Dogs". Note: He did copy it!

The movie isn't really a very bad one, but it just never rises above mediocrity.


This review was originally written on 9/29/96.




Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older