The title of this movie at once reminds me of those instantly forgettable direct-to-video movies that seem to come out by the hundreds, but soon you realize that it is the perfect title for this story. The story takes place in a country called Moldavia, where there is much internal strife over an alleged order that the president gave, which led to a huge amount of innocent deaths. An insurgency rises, demanding that the president be tried in their custody, which presumably would consist of not much more than a brief mention of his crimes followed by torture and execution. That's just an assumption, of course.
Van Damme plays Commander Sam Keenan, a Navy Seal sent in to handle the situation, which grows increasingly desperate and dire. One of the best things about the film is how realistically it presents the mass protests, which are so good that I imagine they must have used stock footage of real protests. Either way, they are seamlessly integrated into the film. Unfortunately, the one street on which the majority of the exterior scenes are filmed looks strikingly like a soundstage, but no matter. The gunfights, another easily botched element, are quite well done here.
There is an authority battle as the clearly competent Keenan struggles to convince the commanders around him of a course of action that might save everyone but may also be more dangerous, while others in the top echelon immediately decide upon the tactic that will certainly save some lives but also certainly doom others. Keenan plays a pretty generic hero in this way, going the more dangerous route to save more lives, but it is undeniable that this is Van Damme at his highest class. He's not given a lot of meaningful stuff to do (he gets to say cool lines like "Get the people to the TLU and the president to the ACR. Go!"), but this is one of his best performances.
His primary assignment is to hold off the impending insurgent force while both the American military and the Croatian army close in, conveniently with exactly the same ETA. You know something big is going to happen soon. Sadly, the CGI air support is pretty dismal, but it serves its purpose. The leader of the insurgency is also a little too much of a movie villain, although I like the final confrontation between him and Keenan (which would be a spoiler, but did you really think that wouldn't happen?), in which Keenan does something that reveals a deep flaw in his character. It's something that some people in the military might like to do to the bad guys in real life, but not the kind of thing you expect from a benevolent movie hero. And by the way, I love how, even with the sheer magnitude of firepower in the movie, it all comes down to a hand-to-hand knife fight.
The movie ends with a sufficiently cheesy scene, although it stands out as a pretty glaring omission that the true guilt or innocence of the president, who allegedly caused so many deaths, was never proved one way or the other. I have been learning a lot about Mao Tse- tung lately, which has led to a gigantic mistrust of certain governments and powerful individuals. I guess we have to assume that he didn't commit the crime of which he was accused. Maybe they were banking on the "Insurgents" vs. the "President," so people would automatically assume who were the bad guys and who was the good guy. Too bad it's not that clear cut in real life
Van Damme plays Commander Sam Keenan, a Navy Seal sent in to handle the situation, which grows increasingly desperate and dire. One of the best things about the film is how realistically it presents the mass protests, which are so good that I imagine they must have used stock footage of real protests. Either way, they are seamlessly integrated into the film. Unfortunately, the one street on which the majority of the exterior scenes are filmed looks strikingly like a soundstage, but no matter. The gunfights, another easily botched element, are quite well done here.
There is an authority battle as the clearly competent Keenan struggles to convince the commanders around him of a course of action that might save everyone but may also be more dangerous, while others in the top echelon immediately decide upon the tactic that will certainly save some lives but also certainly doom others. Keenan plays a pretty generic hero in this way, going the more dangerous route to save more lives, but it is undeniable that this is Van Damme at his highest class. He's not given a lot of meaningful stuff to do (he gets to say cool lines like "Get the people to the TLU and the president to the ACR. Go!"), but this is one of his best performances.
His primary assignment is to hold off the impending insurgent force while both the American military and the Croatian army close in, conveniently with exactly the same ETA. You know something big is going to happen soon. Sadly, the CGI air support is pretty dismal, but it serves its purpose. The leader of the insurgency is also a little too much of a movie villain, although I like the final confrontation between him and Keenan (which would be a spoiler, but did you really think that wouldn't happen?), in which Keenan does something that reveals a deep flaw in his character. It's something that some people in the military might like to do to the bad guys in real life, but not the kind of thing you expect from a benevolent movie hero. And by the way, I love how, even with the sheer magnitude of firepower in the movie, it all comes down to a hand-to-hand knife fight.
The movie ends with a sufficiently cheesy scene, although it stands out as a pretty glaring omission that the true guilt or innocence of the president, who allegedly caused so many deaths, was never proved one way or the other. I have been learning a lot about Mao Tse- tung lately, which has led to a gigantic mistrust of certain governments and powerful individuals. I guess we have to assume that he didn't commit the crime of which he was accused. Maybe they were banking on the "Insurgents" vs. the "President," so people would automatically assume who were the bad guys and who was the good guy. Too bad it's not that clear cut in real life