Well, what should we discuss here to commemorate the opening of yet another Van Damme movie weeks before it heads off to the TV sets of those with very strange viewing habits? Though by no means an expert, my favorite aspect of Van Damme movies is the obligatory sentence to explain his accent. This time, it’s a little tougher for these creative geniuses because they have to explain how these twin boys, separated at birth (okay, so they were six months old) in Hong Kong, grew up to have identical western European accents. The boys’ parents were brutally murdered by a schizophrenic gang who were all cold efficiency killing mom and dad but when they tried to kill the boys, oops, the infants got away. Seems the nurse grabbed one and the family’s mercenary bodyguard, Lewis, grabbed the other. The nurse dumped her kid at a French orphanage. The merc raised his to be a karate champ at a health club in L.A. The accent? “We went to France,” explains Lewis with conehead logic. One brother grows up to be a dashing smuggler, the other is a dork and it’s a tribute to Van Damme’s acting ability that it’s frequently impossible to tell which one is which. I could go on, I’m having a pretty good time at this, but I think I’ll save my usual rants about homophobia, racism, and generally insensitive stupidity for a movie that attracts an audience that reads film reviews.
This article appears in August 16 • 1991 (Cover).