Wake of Death (2004)

After his wife is brutally murdered, an ex-cop wages war against the Chinese triads. Wake of Death is one of my favorite Van Damme films alongside Until Death that came out 3 years after this movie and those 2 films showed that Jean Claude Van Damme can act because he gave a pretty good performance in here plus the film had some pretty good dramatic parts delivered by Van Damme and the rest of the cast gave some pretty good and solid performances, of course the action is non stop hardcore and thrilling and the Mall chase scene with the motorcycles was actually handled really well done. Also the movie has a pretty great soundtrack and the main theme was a mix of drama and western so i liked that as well. Overall Wake of Death (2004) is a great action film and for a straight to DVD movie it does have some pretty quality, acting and fight scenes and even if you're not a big fan of JCVD i think you are going to enjoy the hell out of this film.

At first, I'm a Van Damme Fan. I like him since Bloodsport and shame or not but I hate him since UniSol2. I think everyone knows why... Since 1999 something broke his ego. Maybe, it was his mental problem and the thing with drugs or the world changed but something moved in different way. Sadly all these came back in movies too. Everyone who watched JCVD knows this. He tried and tried to became an actor against martial arts star, but I think he is much more a fighter like an actor. And that was what I always loved in Van Damme. I think this move isn't good. It want to be a drama-action flick but it works not. There are so many weak moments. Please, I think who loves action movies knows what's the different between good and bad. Cheap effects, laughable scenes with overplayed characters kills everything. JC is OK, the problem is the story the cast and directing. Everything is B... Double Impact was B-movie too, but million miles away from this. In 1990 there was mood and an elegant style for these kind of movies. I think after the year 2000, this kind of cinema is only for renting. Somewhere in the past Van Damme was a cinema star, not only a product for DVD... I hope he shows us more JCVD in the future!

I recently saw the film "JCVD" on DVD, which I loved from start to finish. In the Van Damme universe, I am what I would call from the "Bloodsport generation". I saw Bloodsport when I was 17, which was of course the first Van Damme film I've seen. I had seen a few more films from him, but it's only after seeing JCVD I realized how little films I had actually seen from his impressive library. A quick visit to his IMDb page confirmed that although I knew very well who JCVD was, I knew actually very little of him. And so I decided to remedy to that situation by actually watching all of his films in the order they were made.This JCVD pilgrimage had me discover little gems I didn't know at all, such as his fantastic performance in No Retreat, No Surrender (1986), the classic "Bloodsport" energy of Kickboxer (1989), the surprisingly good (and similar story) The Quest (1996), and what I consider to be the most underrated Van Damme film to date Nowhere to Run (1993). At the other end of the spectrum, the very awful and chaotic film Knock Off (1998), the dreadful Universal Soldier: The Return (1999), the deadening The Order (2001), and the total insult to JCVD the action icon Derailed (2002).And so, after such bad films in a row, it was a fantastic breath of fresh air to actually see a film made from real professionals who actually care for the action genre, and for stars like Van Damme who invest their lives in making such films. Wake of Death (2004) was an excellent action-drama, with as deep character development you can get in a revenge flick, more than enough to make you care for the characters throughout the story. Van Damme's performance is top notch, thanks to director Martinez who actually had the good sense to give him TIME to act. The pristine editing supported the overall dark tone of the film "a la" Max Payne (the video games). The action sequences are very entertaining, some of them very brutal and bloody, and the acting of all supporting characters was flawless.Wake of Death is a dark, emotionally charged action revenge film. It's too bad it never received the theatrical run it so well deserved.

All too often in Van Damme movies (or any action movie, for that matter), the action is dumbed down or spread out along a goofy story that is clearly only an excuse for gunfights and car chases. Wake of Death has a moderately clever story and is moderately delivered, but much more emphasis is put on the action. It's gritty and unapologetic with its violence, clearly trying to effectively capture the mob world in which it takes place, and also features what might be Van Damme's best actual acting performance of his entire career. There's an emotional scene in the movie that is so intense it's almost difficult to watch, so I don't want to hear any more from these people who are constantly whining that Van Damme can't act. I'd like to see any of YOU show me anything close to what he did in this movie! Van Damme stars as Ben Archer, an aging mobster who wants to get out and have a normal life with his family. Of course, his family doesn't know what he really does for a living, as far as they know, he is in the "bar" business. Claiming to be tired of the noise and the smoke and the drinking, he tells his incredulous superior that he wants out, and then heads home. Having seen this set-up a dozen times or more, we know that nothing good can come of this.Ben's wife, Cynthia, is a social worker, and soon finds herself with the problem of a boatload of Chinese refugees, all of whom must be detained and shipped back to China. Strangely, though, they are refugees from Hong Kong. I didn't know there were many refugees coming out of Hong Kong in the early 21st century. In fact, I can't think of a time in modern Chinese history when there were refugees coming from Hong Kong.Clearly, this is unimportant to writers Mick Davis and Laurent Fellous, who seem to be just going on the assumption that, because of Mao Tse-tung's brutal, murderous regime, there have pretty much always been refugees coming from China. The ones in the movie definitely look like mainland Chinese and not people from Hong Kong, except for the little girl, who looks Korean and is even named Kim. I can tell you one thing, out of almost 1.4 billion people in mainland China, not one of them is named Kim! Anyway, Cynthia sees this young girl and decides she's too cute to be shipped back to the horrors of Hong Kong, so she risks her job and reputation to take the girl under her wing. Unfortunately, she is the daughter of Sun Quan, a Chinese mobster of the triad variety (you remember them from the Infernal Affairs movies). Quan, clearly, is not happy about his daughter living with some white people ("foreign devils," as they were called back when people really were trying to flee from China), so he sets out to find her, killing anyone who gets in his way.At this point, the movie becomes astonishingly violent, even for a Van Damme film. The movie violence is serious here, like in serious gangster movies. The profanity is thick and the movie is not afraid to shoot older women in the face, showing us her exploding head. I had never seen anything like that in any of Van Damme's movies. Quan kills Cynthia, and Ben's grieving her loss is one of the best scenes in the movie, and one of the best examples of Van Damme's acting ability from his entire career.The soundtrack is suitably depressing when it needs to be, such as in the opening credits, which features one of those god-awful moody soap-opera-ish love songs, like the worst of the Bond themes. There is a major slip-up as the little girl doesn't speak a word of English and then, in the same second that Cynthia starts speaking Chinese (she explains that her grandparents are Chinese, as if language was hereditary), Kim busts out with her perfect American English. Nice. I've been teaching English at a University in central China for two years now, and let me tell you, it is almost impossible to teach them to speak English with any accent other than a Chinese one. For that you have to have been raised in America (or Canada, as it were).The movie is not a cognitive workout, of course, but it is definitely a solid action movie that deserves more recognition than it got. Sadly, like the great Bruce Campbell, Van Damme is a little bit of what they call "box office poison," although I would like to suggest that the reason for this is because of the bad press that he gets from people who jump on the bandwagon, uniformly criticizing his acting and his movies without even really knowing what they're talking about. No, he's not Orson Welles, but he stands for important things and, for all of the shallowness that we've seen in his films, occasionally he takes it upon himself to prove to us that yes, he can act.The problem is that all too often his target audience doesn't require him to, we just want to see his kick the hell out of some bad guys. Wake of Death is the most violent movie he has ever made, and is proof that he is better than most people think he is. I hope one day he really gets the respect that he deserves!