Kill 'Em All

Mozambique

This is unquestionably the worst JCVD movie of all time. Now I came into this with already lowish expectations but as a long time fan (although waning) I had to give it a go. OMG I wish I hadn't. Apart from Peter Stormare (who was JUST ok) the acting, especially the second tier (JCVD, Stormare and Alonso being the first tier lol) was possibly the worst I have seen. The plot lol is rubbish, the fights (the main reason to watch the movie) dull and lacking imagination. High on cliché, low on everything else. You have been warned!!!

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Some people wrote that one cannot expect "Hard Target"- like quality from an aged van Damme. Well, I agree that it's difficult to work with a small budget. A small budget film won't look like a Marvel production, period. Why don't the people involved focus on fight choreography instead? I don't get it. JCVD's age shouldn't matter. Fighting is where the film crew could score points but they don't. It seems like very few people in Hollywood actually get what a beautiful fight could look like. In the words of America's orange clown: SAD! Please watch some old Jackie Chan movies and make fighting visually entertaining again. Nobody cares about a story in a B-Movie. Not really, anyway. We, the old fans of JCVD, just wanna see him perform martial arts. That's it!

I may not a hardcore fan of JCVD that follow him from the early day of Bloodsport but i still acknowledge him as a great martial art artist and a fine action hero in his own right.Nowadays with the booming of CGI action movie people tend to forgot how awesome trashy over the top action movie staring him look like and with this movie Kill'em All i dare to say yes that man can still kick ass.The plot of this movie is very Die Hard like but it have a very good twist but sadly been dumb down by a horrible script.JCVD charm is still there and despite his age his spinning kick is as strong as ever but for the rest of the cast......not so much.The only one tried to put out a solid action scene beside JCVD is not his son Kris but a actress i never heard before named Autumn Reeser which surprise me a lot.Please don't go to this movie with a mindset of a critic but a young 90s teen you will have a good time

Jean Claude Van Damme is getting old, so he needs to take it easy these days with the action scenes. Here he shares the action with Autumn Reeser. Van Damme plays Philip who ends up wounded at a hospital in America. Reeser plays Suzanne, an ER nurse who is patching him up when a bunch of European bad guys arrive and cause mayhem. Philip ends up saving Suzannne's life instead. The film is told in flashback as Suzanne is being interrogated by two FBI agents. You will quickly gather that the film has an unreliable narrator and you can kind of guess the twist in The Usual Suspects kind of way. The film wants to make some kind of statement about the break up of the former Yugoslavia, I thought the time span was all over the place.

Some films have always attempted to rewrite history. This one belongs to those that take it a step further and attempt to rewrite recent events. The result is in this case very anti-Serbian and anti-Slavic. Frankly, I found the film culturally insensitive and offensive (even though I'm not Serbian myself). However, let's look at the craftsmanship quality of the film first. To put it simply, it's a (weak) Die Hard in a hospital with a double Keyser Söze at the end. Nothing new is added to these simple constructs and ironically, I think that's a good thing (a film isn't perfect when you can't add anything to it, but when you can't remove anything). The plot is confusing and chaotic. It doesn't clear up until shortly before the first Keyser Söze twist and when the twist happens, we find out that most of it were lies anyway. Yes, that's exactly the effect the filmmakers were aiming for, but it leaves an impression that they don't know what are they doing. JCVD performed as expected and Autumn Reeser wasn't bad either. Alas, this film isn't just about neutral entertainment. For no reason whatsoever, they decided to make it an "exploitation" film. Phillip's (a typical Albanian name indeed) father could have been an FBI agent murdered by a drug lord. No, they decided to make it political so he was an Albanian separatist killed by Black Hand (yes, the group which "started the Great War" and which actually no longer exists). It's quite clear on whose side the filmmakers are just from a special usage of whitewashing. Albanians are cast by blond and/or blue-eyed Caucasians (preferably Anglo-Saxons, but Spanish and others are OK too) while Slavs are made to look as Siberian/Asian as possible. WOW. Whitewashing was always considered bad, but when you actually manage to offend even white people themselves, you know that you've reached a new level. Misrepresentation of Albanians doesn't stop at appearance. They are characterized as some kind of noble samurai who resort to violence only when their peaceful ways fail. ROFL. By the way, Kingdom of Yugoslavia wasn't created by Soviet Union. It was a result of Paris accords after WWI.

Great story and great fighting scenes. Especially those 2 Swiss guys Daniel Bernhardt and Peter Organ gaved the movie a special tough. Both martial artist had the best, realistic fighting scenes and gaved the movie an unique tense. Even if we can not deny that Van Damme is getting older, he still shows he skills and that he deserves to be the "god of martial arts"! At all very enjoyable!

There was a time when you'd read that Jean-Claude Van Damme was in a movie and make a point of seeing it in the theater. But somewhere along the line his star fell and he began making movies that seemed destined for the land of straight to DVD. It was the same trajectory that happened to Steven Seagal which makes you wonder why the two haven't made a series of films together. If you look at his list of credits his last good movie was probably JCVD out in 2008. Prior to that one you have to go back to SUDDEN DEATH in 1995. Yes, he's made a number of pictures since then and even had the role of lead villain in THE EXPENDABLES 2, but he's never followed up on the potential displayed in his earlier films. It may be in part due to his reputation as an egomaniac or it may be bad management has placed him in poorly made movies. But the fact is this film will not elevate his status. Here he stars as a man with no memory who enters an ER in a hospital about to close its doors. With a limited staff on hand they do their best to patch up this severely wounded man and discover who he is. One nurse named Suzanne (Autumn Reeser) stays with him to help and eventually aids him when a group of killers arrive to take him out, finding out that his name is Phillip. Randomly killing anyone in the ER they track down Phillip and the nurse as he takes them on one at a time. Even wounded he can handle those sent to kill him. Most of this is told in flashback as Suzanne is questioned by two FBI agents, Agent Mark Holman (Peter Stormare) and Agent Linda Sanders (Maria Conchita Alonso). Several things about her questioning seemed odd to me and stemmed from a poor script being used. Both agents seem adversarial to Suzanne as they question her, especially Holman. As a victim in a mass shooting incident one would think they would be a little more sympathetic and less accusatory. The other odd thing, and maybe this is just my personal problem, is finding two agents in the FBI whose accents are as thick as seen here. Again, that could just be me. Very little is believable here and most of it doesn't play out well in any way you look at it. The pacing is up and down and never straight through. Van Damme does little acting and his martial arts techniques have been on display for years. The film tries to redeem itself with a SPOILER ALERT ending that is reminiscent of THE USUAL SUSPECTS. But even that can't save the entire project. For a movie to be good you have to give us something worth watching other than the last 5-10 minutes. Perhaps one day a studio will call up both Van Damme and Segal to do a joint venture, a film with a decent script that allows both of them to show they do have the ability to act and to offer on screen fighting skills that both shared with audiences at the zenith of their careers. This film has a problem just doing that with one of them. If I were Van Damme I'd set my ego aside and also hire new management. Until that happens he'll find himself in films like this one.

I tried so hard to review this movie already. Made some reviews, saved them, erased them, started over. Its really complicated as part of me liked it while the other part really tough it was lacking so much to be a good movie. The cast is genuinely good, not only Van Damme but Daniel Bernhardt which, funny enough, was Van Damme replacement in the Bloodsport Franchise back in the days, but also played villains opposite the like of Keanu Reeves in John Wick or Chuck Norris in The Cuttter. Kris Van Damme, JC's son finally get some action role and even have a fight scene with his father. But despite all of this... the movie failed to keep me interest at times. First of all the cinematography. I don't know if its to hide JCVD's old age or the lack of talents on some of the villains, but the movie suffer from a bunch of jump cuts and camera angle changes during fight scenes. Its not as bad as some of Steven Seagal movies of recent years but its still hurting the movie. The movie also include a lot of "signature spin kicks" which seem not so convincing in this day and age. Maybe Van Damme lost some speed too. As for the story and characters... i think this is where the movie hurt the most for me. JCVD play once again a sad depressing character. On top of this the movie start with this character injured so he look even more tired and depress than other movies. Van Damme proved many thing he is good in roles that involve lots of personality and cheesy dialogue. I enjoyed so much his performances in Ennemies Closer and Welcome to the Jungle. He need to cut from the blank and depress characters, as he has not aged too well facially and look even worst when playing those roles. Honestly he look 15 years older than the age of the character he is supposed to play in this movie. Despite all of this, its not a bad movie. Its very basic low budget action flick, but surprisingly it revolve much more on martial arts than you would expect from JCVD in the current years which i appreciated. Sure there not the best fights filmed on screen, but its decent enough to keep you entertained. There is a few gun fights but there kept to a minimal. Autumn Reeser is pretty decent and the other "big names" are mostly extended glorified cameos. I would say its the kind of movie which is nice to watch once, as a rental or cable TV watch, but it won't leave a mark or anything on you and you won't remember it in T-Minus 2 days... as Jeremy would say.