Double Team

Double Team is the third movie that Van Damme has done for a former HONG-KONG action-movie director. He has done "Hard Target" for John Woo and "Maximum Risk" for Ringo Lam. Double Team is directed by rather splendid Tsui Hark. Hark is excellent at directing action-scenes and Double Team is a good way for him to start in Hollywood. Van Damme plays agent Jack Quinn, and is sent out to kill super-terrorist Stavros, who is played by Mickey Rourke. Quinn fails and is therefore sent sent to a place called "The Colony". "The Colony" is a place where the world's most dangerous terrorists/agents are sent. These agents/terrorists are too dangerous to go free on the street and too valuable to kill. Quinn escapes from the colony and goes after Stavroes for revenge. Quinn is helped by Yaz, who is played by the basket-star Dennis Rodmann. Double Team is full of well made action and martial-art scenes. However, it`s far from perfect. The whole plot is very silly, there are huge logical gaps and holes in the story and Mickey Rourke is far from convincing as a villain. Double Team isn`t a film for everybody. But it`s definetly worth to rent it for an action-fan. I give this movie 7 out of 10.

Look before i start my review lets be honest about this movie, the movie is dumb and really does not make sense really a movie with Van Damme and Dennis Rodman really what do you expect. But lets also be clear this movie could be a lot of fun viewed in the right light and could almost be considered a really fun piece of garbage. Van Damme starts as a agent who is after Mickey Rourke (really Mickey really) while after Mickey, Mickey wife and child gets killed and now Mickey is really bad and spends the whole film trying to kill Van Damme. Van Damme needs help and so he enlist the help of Dennis Rodman(what did the Chicago Bulls cut him from the roster) who is a gun dealer. Well that is all the plot you really need, I mean what i just described could be action gold, not really i mean there is a lot of plot holes and a lot of scenes that just don't make sense. And now i come to the great director Tsui Hark ( i know if you just seen this film and his other movie starting Van Damme Knock Off you could be asking yourself "great director my ---") the director who gave us Once upon a time in china 1,2,3,4,5 and Pecking Opera Blues and other great hong kong movies. But this movie is not even in the same area code to these great movies but he does direct the film for all he's worth and does keep the movie flowing at a great pace and does give us a lot of action and Tsui at least make Van Damme look good as he enlist the great Sammo Hung to do the fights(lets be clear that the stuntman does most of the action for Van Damme) and Tsui Hark even got the great Peter Pau to shoot the film. Yes Peter Pau who went on to win a Oscar a couple years later for shooting Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In the end all i could say is that you could find worse movies starting Van Damme (there is too many to count) and you could find better like Hard Target,Timecop,or maybe Sudden Death. Double Team get a C+. So there Thank You.

Movie itself it quite catchy - the fight of Jack with Asian man in the hotel room was the best, imho...

But some things are under critics. Like exploding on the arena - when eventually whole the building is got blown away - what 'bad guy' of Mickey Rourke was thinking about when placing mines of such explosive power there? :) Or what was on 'good guy' of Dennis Rodman's mind when swapping some mine marks? To play the game 'who dies first - good Jack or bad Stavros? A big number of gotchas that may be forgiven only because it's just an action. Plain action with good fights and explosions...

Double Team has to be seen to be believed. Hell, even the poster does. It exists in that delirious wasteland of the late 90's action genre, a place where anything can, and does go. As the genre evolved, the scientists deep within Hollywood's labs were trying out endless mind boggling action star team ups, even using a few celebrities that had never had a film to their name. In this particular twilight zone we get Jean Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman sharing a spotlight. There's a pairing for ya. Van Damme plays a counter terrorist expert who miserably fails in preventing an attack from dangerous villain Stavros (Mickey Rourke), and is sent to The Colony, where disgraced agents are branded with all the snazzy technology the 90's had to offer, after which being sent back into duty. He needs inside helps to track down Stavros, and finds it in beyond eccentric arms dealer Yaz (Rodman), a whacko who mirrors the man's overblown real life persona. Together they make a run at Rourke, fireworks ensue, blah blah. It's a crappy flick made noticeable by the strange presence of Rodman, and marginally watchable by Rourke, who actually gives Stavros the tiniest glint of surprising gravity, despite how downright silly the whole enterprise is. Loaded with cheese, dated special effects and clichés, it ain't no picnic, but worth a glance during an inebriated late night channel switching blitz.

A logic-free action flick that stretches plausibility way beyond breaking point, Double Team stars Jean-Claude Van Damme as counter-terrorist expert Jack Quinn who, after a botched mission to kill international terrorist Stavros (Mickey Rourke), becomes an unwilling participant in a top secret think-tank on a remote island colony for agents that are considered 'too valuable to kill, but too dangerous to set free'.

When Stavros (Mickey Rourke) abducts Jack's pregnant wife, having vowed revenge for the accidental death of his son during the earlier shootout, Jack escapes the colony, seeks help from an S&M freak gun dealer named Yaz (played by eccentric basketball bad-boy Dennis Rodman), and embarks on a dangerous rescue mission that culminates in an explosive showdown inside a coliseum.

Opening with Quinn escaping from some bad guys by jumping a heavily armoured stolen vehicle through a speeding train (without the aid of a ramp), this film is completely crazy from the get go, and Hong Kong director Tsui Hark doesn't let the insanity subside until the very end, chucking in such spectacular nonsense as Van Damme kicking the crap out of bad guys while hanging from an air-plane cargo net, a Chinese killer who uses his knife with his foot, a top secret society of cyber-monks, and a finale that sees the good guys fight a tiger in the middle of a mine field before escaping certain death from fireball through the use of a Coke vending machine.

Special mention must also be made of the incredible amount of glass that gets smashed during the film (usually because someone has been thrown through it).

Although I'll never quite understand how this film got green-lit, I'm sure glad it did: a more enjoyably insane piece of 90s nonsense you'll be hard pushed to find.

Call me crazy, but I rate Double Team 8 out of 10 simply for being so bloody silly.