Legionnaire - The Beginning of the End

As usual, I lost all motivation for writing about movies this year. I still watch plenty of shit, but writing about it (beyond Letterboxd entries) just didn’t interest me. And now I’m going to make myself get back into it. Part of the problem is that I’m on this stupid completionist kick in which I watch every movie in a series or a director’s filmography. I don’t want to devote the time to write about every single film, so I tell myself that I’ll just do a ranking, which is why two of my last few posts are rankings of Cronenberg and the Leprechaun movies. Because of this, I currently have multiple rankings articles I’m in the middle of, such as the Craig Bond movies, the Transformers series, the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, the Alien franchise, and the Final Destination movies. Will I finish all, or any, of these? I hope so. In the meantime, I needed to fucking write something, and when that’s the case, I turn to Jean-Claude Van Damme.

The Beginning of the End 

Legionnaire always reminds me of a moment from Jackie Chan’s monologue when he hosted SNL in 2000 (you can watch it here, unfortunately it isn’t on YouTube or I would just embed the video). Chan is confronted by fading action stars as his career is in the middle of its Rush Hour heights. Will Ferrell shows up as Steven Seagal, and Chris fucking Kattan shows up as Van Damme. As Chan brags about being in Rush Hour, Kattan counters with, “Well, I did a little movie too last year. Maybe you heard of it. It’s called Legionnaire!” The audience laughs, and a defeated Kattan walks offstage. 

Having Chris Kattan portray JCVD is bad enough, but that Legionnaire joke is doubly hurtful. Not only was it a movie no one paid attention to, but it was also the first time, since becoming a star, a Van Damme movie went straight to video. His previous two theatrical films were Knock Off and Double Team, so you can imagine why this happened. His next film after Legionnaire, Universal Soldier: The Return, got a theatrical release, but that last ditch effort bombed as well, and aside from voicework and his villain turn in The Expendables 2 (in which he was named…Vilain), JCVD has been stuck in the direct to video world.

In that way, Legionnaire marks the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. In the old days, you could count on those theatrical JCVD movies to at least be wacky enough to be fun, but the direct to video era led to JCVD’s only truly boring movies. These are the movies with the awful interchangeable titles like Derailed, In Hell, The Order, Wake of Death, Second in Command, Until Death, Enemies Closer, etc. I’ve seen them all, but I can rarely remember a thing about any of them. But I can easily remember what each theatrical release is about. 

With the direct to video era, I would watch each new Van Damme movie hoping for the rare diamond in the rough (like Replicant or Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning). But most of the films are forgettable. And somewhere in the middle, you end up with the surprisingly decent movie, like Legionnaire. But is surprisingly decent a good thing?

I Prefer Shitshows

If you look up anything on Legionnaire, you’ll likely come across user reviews along these lines: “Better than you’d expect,” “Give this a chance,” “Surprisingly good,” etc. And it’s true, Legionnaire is better than you’d expect; but you’re expecting straight up dogshit, so how big of a compliment is it?

Legionnaire is a throwback film a la The Quest in which Van Damme attempts to make a romantic historical epic. Van Damme plays a boxer in 1920s France who refuses to take a dive for a mobster. He then has to join the French Foreign Legion to escape. While in the Legion, Van Damme becomes friends with three other legionnaires, and the film focuses on the bond that forms among soldiers. Van Damme doesn’t really learn anything, and it doesn’t seem like he really needed to join the Legion to get away from the mobster (especially when his girlfriend was left behind), but this is the movie. 

Ignoring those issues, this is a surprisingly effective story about these four characters that is light on the action you come to expect from a Van Damme film. Sure, there are battle scenes, but Van Damme doesn’t do the splits or even kick anyone. That’s how you know he’s serious. 

I’m not against Van Damme trying to prove he can act (I loved his performance in JCVD), but there is a time and place for it, and the late 1990s were not it. His movies were failing at the time, but his physicality wasn’t. He could still do roundhouse kicks, and there’s a time limit on that ability (there is not, however, a time limit on doing the splits; Van Damme will be buried doing the fucking splits). This was a movie Van Damme should have made in his 50s, not his 30s.

Despite that, the film works. As a Van Damme fan, though, I don’t particularly care if the film works. I want a shitshow like Double Team more than I want a serviceable historical drama. I’ll remember the goofy shit from Double Team for years; I’ll forget every minute of Legionnaire by next week.

That’s what annoys me the most about JCVD’s direct to video era: there aren’t enough crazy movies. And I don’t understand it. I get why some of the theatrical stuff had to play it safe from time to time, but what do you have to lose when you’re making a movie called Wake of Death? I like to think that I am a typical Van Damme fan, and fans like the goofier moments of his best films, like the drunk dancing in Kickboxer, or the “Mwah!” of Bloodsport. 

And if we can’t get the classic goofy stuff, then at least make a movie in which Van Damme plays twins, or has a rickshaw chase scene with Rob Schneider, or faces of against Mickey Rourke and a tiger, or plays an all-American Street Fighter character without even attempting to lose the accent. Give me any of that shit, as long as it’s fun and memorable. 

Thankfully, Van Damme has embraced more comedic stuff in later years, with the Jean-Claude Van Johnson series and The Last Mercenary. Neither of those were great, but they’re a lot better than the forgettable shit. And I’ll gladly take a comedic misfire over Legionnaire, a movie so forgettable that it makes me think of Chris Kattan playing Van Damme on SNL more than it makes me think of the movie itself. 

Van Damme Character Name Check

Alain Lefevre. The movie begins in France, so Van Damme was guaranteed to have a fitting name for this one.

Random Thoughts

This is still technically an action movie, but the boxing scene was regular boxing, not kickboxing. And the rest of the shit was military action, and I want to see Van Damme kicking people, not shooting them.

The drill sergeant is fucking awful. He growls every line like a maniac. It just doesn’t fit with the somber tone of the film. He can’t say normal lines (like “Unpack the ammo”) without snarling them. Every time he talks, it ruins the scene.

Kudos to this film for acknowledging that the Foreign Legion are intruders in a foreign land. A lesser film would attempt to romanticize their mission. Instead, this is much more about the friendship developed by four legionnaires rather than the military goal.

Guido is one of the most destined to die characters I’ve seen recently. He has a girlfriend back home. He’s hopelessly innocent (he spends time with a prostitute talking about his girlfriend). He’s clearly the weakest soldier in the group. It just seemed like he could die in any scene. So when the first big battle started, you knew he was a goner.

Could they not film an ending that shows him finding Katrina? I think I would rather have seen him die with his friends instead of this ambiguous ending. He’s alive, but there’s no guarantee he will make it to another fort. And once there, it’s not like the Legion is just going to let him leave. I don’t know. I just thought this film deserved a more definitive ending than the one we got. There are a few earlier draft endings, according to IMDb trivia, but I don’t know how legit they are. Either way, they weren’t filmed, and this ending is all we have. Oh well.

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