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usually look forward to Jean-Claude Van Damme's
movies, mostly because I know Van Damme has not
followed in the footsteps of fellow fallen action
icon Steven Seagal, who has, simply, stopped
trying, and has been for the last few years. Van
Damme's last outing, the military actioner "Second
in Command" had its problems, but it was,
for the most part, entertaining enough, and you
"got" that the filmmakers were trying.
"The Hard Corps", Van Damme's second
movie in 2006 (a rarity for him), re-teams the
Muscles from Brussels with Sheldon Lettich, the
director/writer on many of the movies that made up
Van Damme's former Hollywood glory days.
Van Damme plays Phillip
Sauvage, an American soldier suffering from some
serious Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder stemming
from his time in
Iraq
. Sauvage snaps out of his stupor just long enough
to join Bowden (Julian Christopher), his former
C.O., to work the bodyguard detail of
ex-heavyweight boxing champ and now successful
businessman Wayne Barclay (Razaaq Adoti, also in
"Second in Command"). It appears that
the release of a notorious rap mogul from prison
has caused
Wayne
's sister Tamara (Vivica A. Fox, "Kill
Bill") to take pro-active action, as the
mogul (Viv Leacock) has made threats in the past
about doing away with the one man responsible for
his incarceration -- Wayne Barclay.
The first night of bodyguard
work does not go well for Sauvage and Bowden, as
the latter gets mowed down during an assassination
attempt on
Wayne
by a Hummer full of Uzi-carrying gangbangers sent
by, of course, the mogul. It's up to Sauvage to
continue the good fight, which means bringing in
re-enforcement in good ol boy Casey (Mark Griffin)
and training some new recruits not of his
choosing. In an effort to "give back" to
the streets that taught him toughness,
Wayne
insists that Sauvage compose his team of
"hard corps" bodyguards by using the
riff raffs from his (
Wayne
's) gym, including a 3-feet tall girl with frizzy
hair. Which leads me to think that this guy isn't
taking his life very seriously, but I digress.
You won't be surprised to
learn that the script by Lettich and George
Saunders is not made of very sturdy stuff. For
one, it makes no sense that Van Damme and his
ex-Army C.O., by virtue of having fought in
Afghanistan and Iraq, would be considered
"the best of the best" when it comes to
executive bodyguarding. Early in the film, Tamara
expects Sauvage and Bowden to guard her brother
while remaining unseen at all times. Yeah, it's
gonna be kinda hard taking a bullet for the client
when you're standing 50 feet away from said
client, Tamara. "The Hard Corps" also
suffers from 10 superfluous minutes involving the
awkward insinuation of romance between Sauvage and
Tamara and a backstory about Sauvage's maybe-maybe
not murdering of civilians during the war.
For an action movie,
"The Hard Corps" is curiously
slow-moving. There is one action sequence about 20
minutes into the film, but the second one doesn't
come around until almost the hour mark. Since the
film clocks in at about 100 minutes, one assumes
Lettich thought he had plenty of time to play
around before, as they say, stuff blows up real
good. Unfortunately for Lettich, he's forgotten
that direct-to-video action movies should never
exceed 90 minutes, and there should be an
explosion, or someone's arm gets broken, at least
once every 10 minutes. To deny the audience these
things would be not living up to the genre's
middling expectations, which "The Hard
Corps", unfortunately, does not.
The film's best action
sequence has nothing to do with all the
assassination attempts on Wayne or even the
(awkwardly staged) all-out action finale, but
rather a mano-a-mano "discussion"
between client and bodyguard about Sauvage's
severance pay in Wayne's gym late in the film. In
the scene, Van Damme and Adoti flex the right
combination of raw machismo and grit, and their
scene provides a nice break from the film's
amusingly lackluster screenplay and uninteresting
plot points. As the Suge Knight-like villain, Viv
Leacock is dead-on, but unfortunately his
character isn't given nearly enough screentime.
And of course, as dictated by genre conventions,
the police are absolutely of no help.
"The Hard Corps" is
not nearly as good as Van Damme's previous outing,
the siege action movie "Second in
Command", owing in no small part to Van
Damme's seemingly lack of commitment to the cause.
As with "Second in Command", Van Damme
seems perpetually stuck in a haze throughout
"The Hard Corps", giving the impression
he didn't really want to be on set. Regardless of
the leading man's lack of charisma, at least he
can still say he actually reads his scripts before
accepting the job, something fellow former action
stars Steven Seagal and, to an extent, Wesley
Snipes can't claim. Although this latest
direct-to-video actioner is very much an
unambitious effort from the Muscles from
Brussels
, I would still pick up his next film instead of
the 5 or 6 Seagal will have put out before then.
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