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Transcript

My Van Damme Summer · Def Rec

• 0:00
  Speaker: The fall season is almost here, but you still have time to watch one more Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.
• 0:07
  Speaker: But which one should you watch?
• 0:09
  Speaker: I spent my summer vacation screening some of the early era cinematic masterpieces from the muscles from Brussels, and I can tell you which one out of all of them is the one I definitely recommend.
• 0:25
  Speaker: No retreat, no surrender from 1986.
• 0:29
  Speaker: As far as karate kid knockoffs go, this one is pretty not great.
• 0:35
  Speaker: Listen, I raw-dogged this movie.
• 0:37
  Speaker: No rift tracks, no nothing, just straight 80s martial arts goodness.
• 0:44
  Speaker: And it was an unintentionally hilarious flick, and what contributed to that fact was the ghost of Bruce Lee, the Sensei Lee.
• 0:52
  Speaker: Points off from making Jean-Claude Van Damme a bad guy, but I do understand it was the mid-80s.
• 0:58
  Speaker: And if you're kind of foreign, you're probably gonna play a Russian.
• 1:01
  Speaker: That's just the way movies were back then, I guess.
• 1:05
  Speaker: Bloodsport from 1988.
• 1:07
  Speaker: What else can be said about this all-timer?
• 1:11
  Speaker: There is a reason it's so beloved, it holds up to this day.
• 1:15
  Speaker: Now there's something my young kid brain totally missed for some reason, and it's a pretty obvious detail if you actually sit and watch it, and as many fans know, well, Chong Li is presented and early on as this intimidating opponent, but he's not really like the main bad guy yet.
• 1:35
  Speaker: You take a look at him, you're like, Oh man, this guy's gonna be rough, but you don't really know who like the central villain is yet, very early on in the movie.
• 1:43
  Speaker: Now, it's not until our our our favorite biker, Jackson.
• 1:48
  Speaker: Well, him and his biker brashness, he calls out Chong Lee, says you're my next victim, or something like that.
• 1:56
  Speaker: And the look on Bolo Young's face is hilarious because he's like, What what did I do?
• 2:03
  Speaker: Why am I out here catching strays?
• 2:05
  Speaker: And at that moment, he of course becomes the main big bad Jean-Claude is gonna have to fight.
• 2:12
  Speaker: And for some reason, I just didn't remember that aspect for many years, but I'm glad I revisited Bloodsport so I can relive the awesomeness.
• 2:22
  Speaker: Kickboxer from 1989.
• 2:24
  Speaker: I don't remember where exactly I read this or saw this, but someone on the internet said that kickboxer is sneakily better than Bloodsport.
• 2:35
  Speaker: Now, it had been years since I watched any of these movies, so I watched Kickboxer first, and then I watched Bloodsport.
• 2:44
  Speaker: And what I can tell you is that whoever this person is, while I respect their opinion, I I don't want to say like they're wrong, but Bloodsport is simply the superior movie.
• 2:58
  Speaker: Kickboxer has its charm, but if I didn't know any better, I would have said kickboxer would have been released before Bloodsport.
• 3:06
  Speaker: But you look at trusty old IMDB, and sure enough, kickboxer is listed as a year after.
• 3:12
  Speaker: So here we are.
• 3:13
  Speaker: In Bloodsport, Jean-Claude Van Am is for sure he's supposed to be like this is he's like a made man at this point, as far as movies go.
• 3:22
  Speaker: Kickboxer, still all about him.
• 3:24
  Speaker: He's on the poster, of course, but he's in a very more reserved role.
• 3:28
  Speaker: But that just shows the guy's range.
• 3:31
  Speaker: I mean, this movie, while I don't consider it better than Bloodsport, it has a lot of charm, it has like the glass on the knuckles, it has the big fight, it has the training montages, and it has, of course, the legendary Jean-Claude dancing sequence.
• 3:50
  Speaker: There's a little something for everybody in kickboxer.
• 3:53
  Speaker: Now, during my early era JC VD watching, I time hopped a little bit and I skipped right to Time Cop from 1994 because I was itching to re-watch this movie.
• 4:07
  Speaker: In fact, I think up until this point, I may have only seen clips of this movie in my entire life, so I was very excited to go back and watch Time Cop in its completion and its entirety.
• 4:20
  Speaker: And man, it lived up to the hype.
• 4:24
  Speaker: And we entered Splitzville, like you wouldn't believe, early on in the film, while Max Walker and his wife Melissa are strolling through a shopping mall, there's even uh a balloon formation resembling a like a person doing the splits.
• 4:41
  Speaker: At this point in human history, if you don't know anything else, just know that at that time, if you cast Jean-Claude Van Damme in your movie, he's going to do the splits.
• 4:52
  Speaker: That's like his thing.
• 4:53
  Speaker: We're here for it.
• 4:54
  Speaker: Now, what I don't really understand about Time Cop, and maybe some of you uh seasoned vet fans can tell me, is why exactly they had to get into that little car and be thrust into this portal.
• 5:09
  Speaker: But when they land at their destination, they don't have a vehicle of any kind.
• 5:14
  Speaker: Like there's some propulsion, thrust, speed, acceleration, rate thing happening here.
• 5:22
  Speaker: But when they I mean famously in the trailer, he Jean-Claude appears on like a road or something, there's a truck he has to lie down or something like that.
• 5:35
  Speaker: It's very dangerous work being a time cop.
• 5:37
  Speaker: I don't recommend it unless you're like Jean-Claude and you have a magnificent mullet.
• 5:43
  Speaker: And if you constantly wear kind of a baggy jacket and roll up those sleeves as far as you can push them.
• 5:49
  Speaker: Now, while I may not understand the time travel rules in time cop because they kind of played it fast and loose, at least when they did show up at their destination in time, they were fully clothed.
• 6:03
  Speaker: Unlike in the Terminator, where listen, I try to keep these videos family friendly, but if you've watched the Terminator, you know clothes don't go back with you.
• 6:14
  Speaker: Returning to the past to go back to the future.
• 6:17
  Speaker: I also watched Cyborg that is listed as 1989.
• 6:22
  Speaker: What a banger year for JCVD.
• 6:24
  Speaker: Now, in this movie, I'd never seen it before, but one thing I instantly recognized is that if you are in a dystopian future movie, your hair has to be flared up and poofy and as spiky as you can get it.
• 6:38
  Speaker: That is just what happens to hair in the apocalypse.
• 6:41
  Speaker: Now in Cyborg, we have a uh a cyborg, a half robot, half person who carries a cure for this disease that has stricken the entire world, and this becomes our MacGuffin, if you will.
• 6:57
  Speaker: In JCVD, he's has to find this person in order to cure the world or something.
• 7:04
  Speaker: I would have thought that this is who Jean-Claude gets paired up with in his escort mission, but no, uh the the cyborg gets kidnapped by the villainous Fender, and then this other lady has to come in and be like the sidekick to Jean-Claude Van Damme, which is fine.
• 7:24
  Speaker: It just kind of feels like you kind of could have combined, consolidated one character there.
• 7:29
  Speaker: But what I will say about the uh the big bandit Fender in this movie, he had one of the greatest motivations for not just a villain, but for just characters in general.
• 7:41
  Speaker: The reason he wanted to keep the cure for himself to prevent people from getting well and just recreating the world, the reason he wanted things to stay the way they are is because he wanted to.
• 7:59
  Speaker: He liked it, and that was just his personal preference.
• 8:02
  Speaker: I loved it.
• 8:03
  Speaker: I gotta say, in a movie called Cyborg, I kind of expected more cyborgs, and in fact, I don't even think this movie really needed a cyborg because, as far as I can tell, all the other main characters um were flesh and bone.
• 8:19
  Speaker: I mean, hey, look, I'm new to Cyborg.
• 8:22
  Speaker: You tell me, were there just more?
• 8:23
  Speaker: Finally, from 1990, it is Lionheart.
• 8:27
  Speaker: This movie I do remember watching when I was a kid, and I have a fond memory of it.
• 8:32
  Speaker: In a way, it's kind of more Street Fighter than Street Fighter, because you have Jean-Claude Van Damme playing a character named Lion in a movie called Lionheart Perfection, no notes, but Lion is on the lamb from his French soldier duties, where he was stationed in a desert outpost thing, which admittedly like sucked for him.
• 8:54
  Speaker: So I don't blame him for trying to leave.
• 8:56
  Speaker: He gets word that his brother in America is killed, so he must go and help the family, the brother's wife and their brother's daughter.
• 9:07
  Speaker: He gets stateside eventually, and he's hurting for money, so he decides to hey join an underground fight club.
• 9:17
  Speaker: Now there's a character named Joshua in here who kind of sees Jean-Claude as like a cash cow.
• 9:22
  Speaker: This guy is a great fighter, he's gonna win him a lot of money, but they actually develop like a genuine friendship, and I loved watching it.
• 9:31
  Speaker: Let me tell you, there's a reason this movie is called Lionheart because for a kind of cheesy martial arts movie from the very early 90s, this movie had more heart than it had any business having.
• 9:42
  Speaker: Underneath all of like the late 80s, early 90s drug abuse, substance abuse, fight club organization.
• 9:51
  Speaker: There was really just a story about bros and family.
• 9:55
  Speaker: It's actually altogether wholesome.
• 9:57
  Speaker: The movie I def rack out of all of these.
• 10:00
  Speaker: If you're gonna watch only one Jean-Claude Van Dam movie to end your summer, it's going to be Lionheart.
• 10:07
  Speaker: Why?
• 10:07
  Speaker: It's because it's just the most fun, and I think it encapsulates and incorporates elements from all these other movies into one package.
• 10:17
  Speaker: You have the best of the best for Van Damme.
• 10:20
  Speaker: He's showcasing all of his skills, he's fighting in different locations, exotic locations, really different, but a little bit more believable kind of villains and combatants and challengers and opponents.
• 10:34
  Speaker: It has everything you want.
• 10:36
  Speaker: It is a big production, a big motion picture.
• 10:39
  Speaker: You get great fight scenes, and as far as acting goes, hey, you know what?
• 10:44
  Speaker: Van Dam is actually showing his skills here.
• 10:47
  Speaker: So if you only have one movie you can watch, I definitely recommend Lionheart.
• 10:53
  Speaker: Much like Van Dam's ESL spoken lines of dialogue in his movie, I'm gonna try to keep this video as short and sweet as possible.
• 11:01
  Speaker: Let me know which Van Dam movie you def rec.
• 11:04
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• 11:07
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• 11:15
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