Wake of Death

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).