One day Jean-Claude Van Damme and Scott Adkins will make a movie together that's a total slam dunk. There's enough talent between them that it seems inevitable, should they keep showing up in movies together. Until then, we'll just have to make do with movies like Assassination Games.
This isn't to say Assassination Games is outright bad. There's certainly better material in here than, say, Nowhere To Run or Derailed, but it's definitely a step back from Universal Soldier: Regeneration and especially The Shepherd: Border Patrol, the first time Adkins and JCVD encountered each other on-screen. At least this time we have the benefit of those two being co-leads as competing assassins.
Van Damme plays Vincent Brazil (a name that, to my recollection, is never once uttered by any character or otherwise stated or shown, but hey it's what he's listed as in the credits). He's a burned out assassin who gets the job done well enough, but it's clear his heart isn't in it anymore. Brazil is far more interested in coming home to his well-furnished hidden apartment — accessed by going through a false wall in his crappy cover apartment — where he's got a collection of art, violins and a taciturn pet turtle. Adkins plays Roland Flint, who got out of the hitman business after his wife was raped and brutalized and left in a catatonic state by a sleazy gangster named Polo (Ivan Kaye).
Naturally, Flint and Brazil get in each other's cross-hairs (almost literally) when they both go after Polo upon his release from prison. But because they're both after the same mark, things go wrong and the two briefly have beef before realizing they should actually team up since it'd be mutually beneficial.
That Flint and Brazil team up so quickly is something of a relief as it always stretches credulity when two protagonists take too long to realize their both on the same side. But, on the other hand, it feels a bit of a waste that we only get a single, brief throwdown between Adkins and Van Damme. It's pretty decent, but not nearly as exciting or well-choreographed as what Isaac Florentine delivered in The Shepherd. And really that can be applied across the board here. Director Ernie Barbarash's work behind the camera is perfectly serviceable. It's clear, concise and isn't chopped to death in the edit. It's fine … but we could have used more. Then again, apparently Van Damme suffered a heart attack in the middle of filming, so maybe it's a miracle things turned out as well as they did action-wise as such.
What you can't blame on a heart attack, though, is the script. There's just not much here. Van Damme gets a Leon: The Professional-esque relationship with an abused prostitute next door, but it isn't developed to even a small fraction of the relationship we see between Leon and Mathilda. More's the pity because Van Damme, as usual, seems game for something deeper to dig into. Adkins, however, gets even less to work with as he's either putting the screws on his informant buddy or trying to take care of his incapacitated wife. There's a b-story with two crooked Interpol agents (one of whom is played by JCVD's son, Kristopher Van Varenberg), but you could mostly excise them from the story and very little would be lost. Mostly this is just a pretty dour and drab affair (seriously, why not just film it in monochrome if you're otherwise going to make the movie look so washed out?) that could have seriously used some occasional bursts of humor to liven things up or otherwise make them more palatable.
It's difficult to recommend Assassination Games. Were it one that ever got any kind of basic cable rotation or one that popped up on streaming services it'd be a decent afternoon waster, but as it stands this is really only one for hardcore JCVD/Adkins/DTV action fans to seek out.
Van Dammage Report Statistics For Assassination Games:
Number of splits: 0
Number of split kicks: 0
Reason for being European: Brazil lives in some unnamed, obviously Eastern European city so we're just going to assume he's either a native or otherwise from the region.
Best line: N/A
You can purchase Van Dammage Report: Vol. 1, a compilation of these essays that also includes content unique to the book, by clicking this link to Amazon.
