Sudden Death (1995)

Starring - Jean-Claude Van Damme; Powers Boothe; Raymond J. Barry; Whittni Wright & Ross Malinger Director - Peter Hyams MPAA - Rated R for a substantial amount of strong violence, and for language. The Muscles from Brussels is back. This time good old Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a fire marshal who just happens to be assigned to check the arena for fire violations before an NHL playoff game. Now this normally would not be much of a basis for a movie. (Not even a Van Damme movie.) If you throw in the fact that the Vice President of the United States is going to be in attendance at this game, and then add a few terrorists to the whole mix, you may have the ingredients for a half decent little action thriller. Maybe. Powers Boothe plays Joshua Foss, a terrorist who decides that he wants a little cash. He figures the best way to do that is by taking over the private box that the Vice President is watching the game from by using men with big guns. Just to make sure he has everyone's attention he wires the whole arena with explosives. If anyone tries to get in or out of the arena, they are in for a little surprise. Now back to our hero. Well good old Jean-Claude's character, Darren McCord, has taken his two kids to see the game while he does whatever it is fire inspectors do during a hockey game. As bad timing would have it, he manages to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and it is up to him to single-handedly save everyone in the building, including the Vice President, assorted dignitaries and his two kids. The burning question here is -- Gee, will he manage to do it? Well, I'm pretty sure that you can take a wild stab at that one. Maybe I'm being a little hard on the plot line, but it deserves it. As original as this idea is, and to the writers credit it is an original idea, they just take it waaaay over the top here. I'm not going to give anything away but let's just say there is really no need of our intrepid fire marshal getting into hand to hand combat on the peak of the roof of the stadium. All right, I've made my cracks. If you can get by the total lack of believability in the plot you will find Jean-Claude giving one of his best performances to date. (Let's face it; if you enjoy this type of film you realize that in most cases plot is an afterthought at the best of times.) We still aren't talking a possible best actor nomination here, but his acting skills do seem to be getting better. Powers Boothe is great as the villain. While he is truly evil, somehow you have to like him. It's a shame Boothe isn't more widely recognized for his work, or for that matter given better roles, since he is always a lot if fun to watch on screen. I've got a few other beefs with this film. One of them is a subplot involving how Van Damme's character came to become a fire inspector. As a firefighter a child died as he was trying to save her, and he hasn't been the same since. I really don't know why this story line was included in the film. Perhaps it was to make him more sympathetic and make us root for him against the bad guys all that much harder. Although I was left asking why are they wasting my time on this crap? In the end I would say that I would probably recommend this film to Van Damme fans or to those who just love action flicks regardless of the questionable writing. To everyone else out there, I would have to say that there are better Van Damme films out there. If you are in the mood for the "one guy takes on a bunch of terrorists" theme -- rent the original Die Hard. 5/10 - Not bad, but not great. Reviewed February 18, 1998 by Joe Chamberlain