This is the first part of our two-part discussion about the 1988 "martial science" classic, Bloodsport, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme in his first big starring role.
Rik: By the late 1980s (and for the bulk of that decade), I was definitely getting more and more into martial arts films. I thought that I had seen most of the major science fiction classics by then, and while horror was more prevalent in my local Video City, I too had gone through most of the bona fide classics (that were readily available on VHS) and was really just picking through the bones to find a decent film here and there. But martial arts as a genre were still a fairly untapped resource to me. However, I kind of got into them the "white guy" way, which was, sad to say now, Chuck Norris films. I saw his early flick Good Guys Wear Black in a theatre back in 1979 after I saw Siskel and Ebert feature the film on their show. I don't remember their review, and I think the show was actually about "Stars of the Future" or something similar; I just remember seeing Chuck kicking ass in a clip on their show, and knowing right then that I had to see Good Guys Wear Black.
I had seen Enter the Dragon by this point, as well as the other major Bruce Lee films, and while I loved them all, Bruce was already a few years dead. For me, without much knowledge of the genre in those pre-internet days, the implication at the time was that kung fu movies died with Lee as their master. I did not know about the Shaw Brothers films or the wide variety of other chopsocky flicks in the world. Asian films, apart from Godzilla movies, were fairly unknown to me in general. I would not really know anything about samurai films, apart from John Belushi's spoof of them on SNL, until I saw Shogun (the NBC mini-series) and Shogun Assassin in the same year (1980). I would get acquainted with Jackie Chan in The Cannonball Run and The Big Brawl, but I had no idea he would ever blow up across the globe like he did eventually. It would be a few years before I started running into his films again. I hate to bring even a smattering of racial identity to this, but for a too skinny, blonde white kid to see someone like Chuck Norris come along and kick serious booty, it was a big deal to me then. (I have since grown up and such things do not matter to me anymore.) I did not connect Norris to Return of the Dragon either; seriously, I did not actually know his name until Good Guys Wear Black. After that, I went to every Norris film that came out up through the second Delta Force movie. Then I went cold on Chuck, and that has pretty much remained constant through today, which is great, because he and I will never come close to sharing the same opinion on anything.I also started going to anything in the theatres with martial arts in it: Sho Kosugi's Enter the Ninja series, Hollywood pastiche/tribute films like Big Trouble in Little China and The Last Dragon, Jackie Chan’s first foray into the U.S. market, The Big Brawl, and even low-budget films that you can't believe made it to a U.S. theatre like Tongs. Hey, standards often had to be low in order to see martial arts on the big screen. And on video? For every horror science fiction flick I was renting, I was also getting a martial arts film beside it. I watched everything that I could, and it is seriously astounding that I never made the leap into trying out karate or another form on my own. (The truth is, I am remarkably uncoordinated to be able to participate in any form of athletics outside of bowling or darts, and at the time had no muscle on my body whatsoever. I also have shyness in social situations that kept me from joining a gym or a dojo at all.)
And when Jean-Claude Van Damme came along? Well, I did not see Bloodsport in a theatre, and am unsure if it even played in Anchorage. If it did, how I missed out on it I’ll never know, except to say I was probably in a play at the time. I saw it first on video, but once I did, that was it. I had found my new action hero. I will also admit that there was a bit of a man-crush as well, before that term had really come along. He was just too pretty, and normally this would have made me believe he was mere fluff and not worthy of serious attention as an action guy. But he kicked major ass, or at least gave the impression that he did, and you really believed that he could fight his way out of any situation. And he was just immensely pretty, and… and… what are these strange feelings coming over me once again?!!
From Cyborg in 1989 through Maximum Risk in 1996, I saw every Jean-Claude film that hit our local theatres. We even formed an unofficial club around seeing his films, wherein we reveled in common JCVD tropes that seemed to pop up in every film: 1) the explanation for his Belgian accent, especially in American scenes; 2) showing off his naked or nearly naked perfectly muscled derriere (or body); 3) the first scene in a film where you can see him visibly thinking through his lines in English; and 4) how deep into the film would we get before he did his trademark splits. And from my first video viewing of Bloodsport up probably through 2005, when I gave away my well-worn VHS copy, it is likely that I saw Bloodsport several dozen times, though the last time I watched it was probably near the end of the '90s. By then, like for many of us JCVD fans, once he started teaming up with the likes of Dennis Rodman, you could smell the decay and desperation, and we fled like rats from a sinking Jean-Claude.
Now, Aaron, how is it you avoided seeing Bloodsport, generally considered to be somewhere in the lower range of martial arts classics, until recently? What's your relationship with Mr. JCVD?
Aaron: For once I have a fairly concrete reason for not seeing one of these films that we discuss. I was ten when Bloodsport came out, too young to see it in a theatre (to answer your implied question, I do have a memory of seeing the Bloodsport poster in an Anchorage theatre; I believe this is accurate, but I have no proof of it), and I grew up in a house without cable. Of course, I had friends and cousins with cable, and I was given a fair amount of autonomy when it came to the movies I rented at this age (it’s likely my mom would have balked at Bloodsport based on the title and cover alone, but it’s equally likely I could have snuck it past her), but it was just something I wasn’t interested in. To be shamefully honest, I was kinda scared of it.
I was a fairly sheltered child, and Bloodsport seemed a bit extreme for me. I, like you, had fallen under the spell of Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee films, and unlike you I actually had joined a dojo for a short, miserable time (it was not the right time or place; later in life I did join a kung fu school and it was one of the most positive experiences in my life). I had even started to get into martial arts through the monumentally crappy -- but still silly and fun for twelve-year-olds -- films of Chinese schlockmeister Godfrey Ho. A surprisingly large number of these films were available for rental at my local Video City, and came in enticing foil-embossed covers for easy detection on the packed shelves. But something about Bloodsport, from the images I’d seen to the things I’d heard from older or braver friends, convinced me that this movie was something new. The destruction in the action movies I had been seeing up to that point were focused on property damage, while Bloodsport promised horrific bodily damage.
And then, when I was at the age and temperament to enjoy Bloodsport, only a few years later, the cultural attitudes had changed and the film seemed laughably outdated. Jackie Chan had burst upon the American action scene, and my growing appreciation of action tended towards Chow Yun Fat, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, and Michelle Yeoh. They were all arriving on our shores to point out how bloated and silly Western action films had become. Stars like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal were instantly made obsolete, and even juggernauts like Stallone and Schwarzenegger were faced with severely diminishing returns. As you yourself pointed out, JCVD had pretty much been reduced to a punchline, starring in films with notably psychotic sports stars. These films felt inessential and, worst of all to a pretentious teenager, inauthentic.And so I missed out on almost all of JCVD’s filmography, even though I loved at least one of his films from this heyday: Hard Target. Of course, it was easy to justify that enjoyment by pointing to the involvement of John Woo, a director who had yet to disappoint me in the gun-fu department. Over the years my opinion of Jean-Claude Van Damme has greatly improved, even if the quality of his films has greatly decreased. Sure, he’s been in a couple of legitimately good movies like JCVD, and he’s popped up in some interesting projects that play off of his outdated tough guy image, but the majority of his films these days are no-budget DTV flicks filmed in dirt-cheap Eastern European locations. But, the thing is, he’s become a fairly decent actor. As his youthful face became more lined, and his physical prowess has diminished (though just barely), his on-screen charisma has actually grown, and I generally enjoy seeing him pop up. This got me thinking I should make an effort to see his earlier star-making films. Whatever my opinion of him was, JCVD was a pretty large pop-cultural figure to many of my generation.
I’m not going to draw this out anymore; I loved Bloodsport. It was ridiculously entertaining, owing to a reliable story structure familiar to any kung fu fans; young fighter enters a not-so-secret tournament to avenge the honor of a loved one. Underestimated by the established fighters, he inevitably battles his way to a showdown with the villainous reigning champ. It’s such a reliably satisfying story arc that it’s still being used in dozens of films every year, with little deviation. It really only requires, to be successful, any two of three things; a charismatic hero, colorful villains, and well-choreographed fights. Bloodsport has the first two, and is fairly accomplished with the third. At least for a low budget, independent, American film about martial arts.
Rik: I, too, love Bloodsport, though my estimation of it as a film – already fairly rated in the middle range and mostly tongue-in-cheek -- has come down a little bit with my most recent viewings. I think that at one point I could just look at this as a great martial arts flick with a few plot issues that bothered me, but now the restrained budget and the straining at the seams of the picture are far more obvious to me, though not enough to make me turn against the film, and stop seeing it as a really fun, kind of stupid action flick.
You are also correct about Jean-Claude having grown as an actor over the years to where he is a reliable presence onscreen, even if he doesn’t get much in the way of big screen work these days, outside of appearances in things like The Expendables 2 (which I admit that I haven't seen yet). I would love to see him make a big screen comeback in the manner of Liam Neeson, who became a true action star about the same age that Jean-Claude is now. While Neeson is a much better actor, of course, Jean-Claude already has action credentials, and is still fit enough that he probably pull off ridiculous action scenes far more believably if he got the chance.
Bloodsport is the purportedly true story of Frank Dux, who in our real world is a martial arts instructor and fight choreographer in California. Everything that happens to Dux in the film – his military service, his undercover intelligence work that makes him far too important an asset to the military to possibly lose his life in the fighting arena, and his eventual victory at the Kumite – have all been highly disputed over the years, and the articles written by such sources as the LA Times and statements from other doubters supposedly exposing Dux as the basest sort of fraud have brought about lawsuits from Dux for slander and libel. There have been books written about his claims, and he too has published his own autobiography refuting the accusations. I don’t know enough about any of it to really say where I stand on the issue; all I know is that in 1988, more so than today where everything is suspect when someone claims “true story”, we really believed that Dux was some sort of superman after seeing Bloodsport. What is your take on Dux’s story and his possibly amazing adventures in the real world, Aaron?
Aaron: I can honestly say that the thought of digging through Frank Dux’s story and learning all the details and trying to parse what’s truth, what’s exaggeration, and what’s an outright lie, fills me with a deep sense of exhaustion. What I can tell you is that when that end title came up, telling us that the preceding story was based on the true exploits of Frank Dux, followed by a list of his Herculean labors… well, I just assumed that was a load of bullshit. We could spend a few dozen pages just bringing up how ridiculous Frank Dux’s (real or imagined) exploits are – and a quick Google search shows me many have already done so – but I couldn’t care less. Not that that’s a deal breaker; I’m used to ignoring a film’s claims to reality, and I generally just take it to be marketing bluster. But it has given me a rather dim view of the real life person Jean-Claude is playing. I’ve been in enough white-guy dojos, and spent time around enough Westerners who take martial arts way too seriously, to know that anyone who proudly makes those types of claims would be a real bummer to spend any time around. I immediately thought of Danny McBride’s character from The Foot Fist Way, and if that film isn’t familiar to our readers, I’d advise them to just imagine any Danny McBride character as a martial arts instructor, and that’s what I assume Frank Dux is like in real life. Had I seen this movie when it came out, I likely would have just thought Frank Dux must be the coolest guy in the world. As a skeptical adult, I have trouble buying any of it.
But let’s get back to the movie, where I’m more than willing to accept the events on display at face value. As a first time viewer, with very few preconceptions of the film, there was nothing in the frequent shoddiness to disappoint me. It’s a Cannon Group production, and I’d seen enough of them as an adult (as well as the excellent Electric Boogaloo documentary about the Golan-Globus partnership) to have a clear conception of the resources they were working with. To that end, while the film is cheesy and dated and often cheap looking, it was well utilized and always fairly enjoyable in its faults. I felt the movie got pretty good mileage out of actually filming in Kowloon, although a lot of the shots used could have easily been replicated on a soundstage.
Like you, I found it difficult to decipher just what level of infamy the tournament resided at. It’s spoken of in hushed tones and is apparently not discussed with outsiders, and yet it’s also common knowledge among military commanders in America. It’s being held in the walled city of Kowloon, in a chamber hidden within a maze of back alleys, with ties to the local Triads, and yet it’s also controlled by the IFAA (the International Fighting Arts Association, which actually exists, though seems to be a mainly American organization inspired by, among other things, Bloodsport). At the very least, the tournament had to be semi-public in order for Frank Dux to be an internationally known record holder. And we see this is the case when basically everybody who is not the female reporter intent on writing an expose of the fight is able to just waltz into the arena with no hassle.
Although really, this just added to the sense of fun for me; either as a running joke in the film, or a sign of a rush-job script, it fell on the enjoyable side of bad every time. It was a surprise to me, actually, just how much fun this film is. Clearly the extreme experience I was anxious about as a kid never manifested itself, and it turns out Bloodsport has a pretty light tone, perfect for budding martial arts enthusiasts of all ages. There are a couple of light sexual references, but the dirtiest the film gets is when we see Jean-Claude’s bare ass for a split second after a night of sexual relations that occurred between tastefully discreet edits. The fights have some blood, of course (gotta deliver on that title), but for the most part they’re all pretty tame in regards to actual physical damage. Bloody noses abound, although there is one gruesome shot of a bone protruding from a fairly fake mass of prosthetic makeup. In general this film had a sense of fun I totally didn’t suspect as a child.Rik: The opening of the film has an extended sequence where Jean-Claude sets a record for longest time spent waiting in a foyer as he flashes back for what seems like half an hour (not really) over his journey from starting out as a callow, brooding youth with criminal tendencies to getting transformed by martial arts master Senzo Tanaka (played effectively by Roy Chiao) into a fighting machine capable of winning an international tournament like the Kumite.
The training montage built into the month-long flashback is the part of the film where we get crazy scenes such as when Van Damme is suspended upright between several trees with pulleys and ropes tied around his wrists and ankles, and he starts flexing and pulling himself upward until he snaps one of the ropes free from its mooring. I don’t know how I would have reacted to this scene were I seeing for the first time today, but back in 1988, it was pretty convincing to me that Jean-Claude was pretty amazing to behold. We also see the first example of him doing the full body splits, and again, this astounded us at the time. Before we even got close to “real” fighting in the film, Jean-Claude had won us over.
And then there is the post-Star Wars blindness training, where Jean-Claude (I have a hard time referring to him as Frank, his character name, because after all, he is so Jean-Claude), as a teenager, has to learn how to use his remaining senses to perceive the world and eventually fight, you know, just in case some villainous cretin decides to cheat and blind Jean-Claude in the closing match of a big Kumite tournament. (Will that happen in Bloodsport? Who knows?) Jean-Claude also has to learn how to serve tea while blind but even after successfully completing this task and sitting down to enjoy the tea, Senzo sends a hard chop towards Jean-Claude’s face. Even with his blindfold still in place, our hero easily blocks Senzo’s blow. We see that Senzo and his wife (who seems a little too wrapped up in this scene) are both pleased with the progress. When the training montage (and the lengthy flashback) are done, Jean-Claude finally goes in to see his master, who is supposedly old (he doesn’t look any older) and tired and laying in bed. He tells Senzo of the Kumite tournament, and Senzo tells Jean-Claude that his own spirit will fight alongside his pupil. I guess he is dying, but there is nothing else said of this before the film transitions to Hong Kong.
While it is immensely clichéd today, as I mentioned, this opening worked wonders on me in 1988 at the age of 24. Jean-Claude – and his very Jean-Claudeness – was sold to me in just a few short minutes. How did you see the training montage opening?
Aaron: If there were one part of this movie I could go back in time to remove or alter dramatically, it would be that training montage. Actually, strike that; the training montage was fine, it was the flashback structure that really just bored me to tears. It goes on for so long, and is for the most part highly repetitive and stilted, that it was clearly included and drawn out to pad the running time of the film. Think of the other big training montages, think of any montage from Rocky, and there’s continual movement and fast paced editing set to some inspirational song. The training montage here is a bunch of shots of people standing around and then suddenly striking out in some seriously unconvincing stage fighting. I won’t deny that Jean-Claude’s freeing himself from those ropes still has some charm derived equally from its badassness and its cheesiness, but everything else just drags on forever. And don’t even get me started on the kid who played young Jean-Claude (Pierre Rafini, in his only acting job). It was clear from his slightly bewildered stare and awkward physical demeanor that this was the mentally challenged kid the older kids keep around only because they can always talk him into doing anything. In a film full of non-actors, this kid manages to stand above the rest.
Luckily this segment isn’t actually that long, it just feels that way. In pretty quick order we’re in Hong Kong, where Jean-Claude has a meet-cute with Donald Gibb (probably still most well-known as Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds) that actually telegraphs their relationship as one of antagonism, until they come to respect each other’s skill at primitive martial arts video games. And after that it’s on to the Kumite. One thing that seemed odd to me, along the lines of not understanding how secret the tournament is supposed to be, is how Gibb got invited to this tournament. This is supposed to be a gathering of the best of the best, world-class masters of a variety of fighting styles from around the world. And then there is Gibb, whose fighting style recalls Mongo in Blazing Saddles. He isn’t skilled so much as big and bulky and able to knock people out of the ring with basic pro-wrestling maneuvers. Jean-Claude had to prove his credentials through a display of genuine skill, but Gibb has done so well that he’s apparently been invited several times.Rik: I am not a fan of Revenge of the Nerds (unlike a lot of people that I know; somehow that one was lost on me), and so Gibb’s charms somewhat evade me as well. This is not to say that I don’t like his presence in this film, and if I can say one positive thing in defense of him in his fight scenes in Bloodsport, it’s that he has presence. As in massive, hulking presence, where he might terrify you just seeing him as you step into the ring. I admit he is a puzzler. He seems rather out of shape in general, and I can’t imagine he has ever been invited to a fighting tournament outside of a biker bar. That said, he and Jean-Claude do seem to have a bit of onscreen chemistry, and as sidekicks go, he’s a good one to have on your side. But, could this particular character ever gain entrance as a fighter at the Kumite tournament? I highly doubt it. (And yeah… that kid playing the young version of Jean-Claude is truly awful. Thank goodness his film career was so brief.)
[To read Part 2 of this conversation about Bloodsport, click here.]
No comments:
Post a Comment