Great Film: Second in Command
Above average but Van Damme lets his recent standard drop!
The film sees Van Damme star as Sam Keenan who is given the task of
protecting the new president of Moldavia (made up? Maybe!) from violent
protesters and ardent supporters of the country's previous regime.
Essentially this is a siege movie, and with a plot somewhat resembling
Dolph Lundgren's The Defender. Both movies are very similarly toned,
however while Lundgren received mostly positives from that film (and
more so from his directorial follow up the Mechanik) Van Damme will
probably not earn the plaudits on this one. Now the man himself is not
the problem, but the film suffers from amateurish direction and overly
ambitious delivery of it's ideas in which the film tries to deliver the
requisite amount of atypically military imagery. For instance
helicopters make appearances in this film, only mostly they are poorly
done CGI helicopters. As such the films attempt to look more expensive
results in it looking cheaper. This is where SIC fails and where The
Defender did not.
The direction from Simon Fellows lacks imagination, cohesion and
competence. The trouble is the director is too quick to try and mimic
certain styles from other directors. There is also too much
compensation made in the editing room. Many of Fellow's stylistic
choices do not work and only serve to hinder the film and whereas Dolph
Lundgren made the Defender taut and polished, SIC is sometimes a little
slipshod. However as the film progresses, Fellows gets a little more
controlled. On a technical standpoint the rest of the film is okay,
with mostly polished cinematography and an okay musical score.
The cast are good with Van Damme ably supported by Raz Adoti, Julie Cox
and Alan Mckenna and William Tapley. Jean Claude himself is good in a
pretty straight down the middle kind of role. He's not required to
stretch as much as in Wake Of Death, but Van Damme gives his role a
humanity and the role some conviction and thus adds depth to the 2
dimensional character as written on the page. Van Damme is certainly
developing as an actor and he now adds so much to roles that other
action stars would simply do competently. JC has improved so much and
in regards to the action stars of the moment Van Damme is the most
interesting as an actor. I certainly hope he stretches himself in
future roles, cause I think having matured as a person he has a world
weariness to him and an inner depth that shows up in his last few roles
and there is now something going on behind those eyes.
The action in the film is okay. In terms of hand to hand combat there
as some nice brief flourishes from JC, and there's a average length
fight scene at the end but that suffers from poor editing and choice of
shots. As for the rest it's primarily gunplay and Fellows chooses to go
docu style which half walks and half doesn't. However the last half
hour of the film is mostly action and the pace picks up nicely and we
have a good amount of explosions going on.
Overall this is not a write off and by no means one of Van Dammes
worst. It's good to have him back after a long wait following Wake Of
Death, but understandably some fans may be disappointed. I can only say
to them that Hard Corps promises much more and that also this film is
far better than Seagal's recent turkeys. **1/2
Cast
- GSgt. Earl 'Gunny' Darnell played by Razaaq Adoti
- Cmdr. Samuel 'Sam' Keenan played by Jean-claude Van Damme
- Michelle Whitman played by Julie Cox
- Capt. John Baldwin played by Alan Mckenna
- Anton Tavarov played by Velibor Topic
- Frank Gaines played by William Tapley
- Mike Shustec played by Warren Derosa
