At the tail end of 2022, I reviewed a couple of books about action movie stars, 'Hard to Watch: The Films of Steven Seagal' and 'Missing the Action: The Films of Chuck Norris'. They were both edited by David C. Hayes but written by multiple hands, including yours truly. Collectively, we took on the task of watching every film these legends made and talking about them in just a thousand words. And every TV episode. And every commercial. And every energy drink. You get the picture.

Well, there was a third book in this series, 'Bloodspurt: The Films of Jean-Claude Van Damme' and I've been looking forward to it for a while because it seemed likely to be the best. In his review of 'Derailed', Ron Ford explains this rather well by pointing out that Van Damme is to him the most palatable of the three actors. Seagal only wants to look like a badass. Norris has to always be the squeaky clean moral hero. Van Damme, on the other hand, plays the roles he's given, from good guys to bad guys, saints to assholes, serious dramatic roles to comedic sendups.

I'd take this a step further though. Every contributor seemed to agree that Seagal is an asshole in real life who can't act, can't fight and, to a large degree nowadays, can't even move. He only made three or four good movies, all early in his career, and that doesn't particularly make for engaging writing, especially over a book length. Most of us also agreed on Chuck Norris too but differently. While we don't necessarily agree with his politics, he's a better actor, a far better fighter and very clearly a better mover than Seagal. What's more, his films reflect that. Many of us were surprised by how much we enjoyed his movies and his book is better for that.

Compared to both those actors, however, Jean-Claude Van Damme is far more versatile. Not only has he made a long string of martial arts movies, even if almost all of them require him to do the splits, he's also gone seriously meta in films like 'JCVD', he's sent himself up in TV shows like 'Jean-Claude Van Johnson' and he's made a series of unusual cameos in a bunch of films, mostly abroad. His career is far more consistent than Seagal's and far more varied than Norris's. Put simply, he's made better movies and a lot of them, even if there are duds in and amongst.

I was therefore eager to see if that translated into a better book and, while it's far from perfect, it's easily the best of the three for plenty of reasons that have nothing at all to do with the detail that I contributed a lot more to this one. I wrote three reviews in the Steven Seagal book and four for the Chuck Norris, but I ended up turning in fifteen this time, a rather unbalanced chunk of his career that led to my reviews taking up about a third of the second half without me making much of an appearance in the first.

The benefit of this is that I got to cover a bunch of his foreign films, from 'Knock Off' and 'Jian Bing Man', which are Hong Kong movies, to 'Narco' and 'Beur sur la ville', which are French. Only 'Knock Off', of all my reviews, dates back to the 20th century—which suddenly seems so long ago— but it's easily my favourite JCVD after 'Bloodsport'. The rest range from 2001 to 2017 with three from 2012 alone. Van Damme only appears in cameos in the three foreign films mentioned above, but all of them are particularly fascinating films anyway for other reasons.

Of course, I'm not going to review my own writing, so will focus on everybody else. The intro is by John Bruske, who has special expertise in JCVD, being the driving force behind the 'Jean Pod Van Dammecast'. He does well on 'Kickboxer' but less so on 'Black Eagle', where he relies too much on synopsis on too little on analysis. Unfortunately that holds true for Kent Hill's look at 'Bloodsport' and that's a real shame, because that's really the last movie anyone needed to drop the ball on in this book.

However, Hill finds the balance in his review of 'No Retreat, No Surrender' with Van Damme as a bad guy. This is what I want from this book and there are plenty of other examples. William Tea is on fine form with 'Cyborg', even if he includes a manifesto, and in a passionate defense of 'Street Fighter', a review I very much like of a film I very much don't. Paul Counelis is equal to the task of covering Van Damme's first four bit parts in a single chapter too. There's a lot of good stuff early on, even if it frustratingly doesn't include 'Bloodsport'.

The negative side is more often the general approach. Once again, there isn't a contents page and there are no images. There's a consistent use of the wrong smart apostrophe in front of shortened years and there are plenty of odd typos and inconsistencies littered across the book. Also, as new writers join in, they often use the same intro as if they've written the first chapter. They're not, so that quickly gets old. Of course, some chapters are better than others but it's a rare anthology to escape that fate.

That even applies to different pieces by the same author, like Bruske above. Arking's 'Time Cop' is out of place but he has more fun with 'Time Won't Let Me', the Smithereens music video from the same movie, even with Fanthorpe-esque padding to meet the word count requirement. The other review I'll call out for special mention is 'Pound of Flesh', a late entry in Van Damme's filmography from 2015, because Chris Brown made me want to see that movie. Others, such as Tea, Hill, Bruske and even Kurt Belcher with 'Universal Soldier' would have done, but I've already seen those films. This one I haven't and now I need to.

OK, there's another one that I want to see but I know I can't and neither could Bruske, who had the task of reviewing it anyway. It's the perfect chapter for him, as a Van Damme podcaster, because it appears to be a highly personal project for JCVD but one that he has consistently failed to get into release. It's reviewed here as 'Frenchy' (2014), but it's gone by a variety of other names. I already knew a little about this but learned a lot more from Bruske's review. Maybe one day it'll finally see the light.

One thing I liked in the Seagal and Norris books was a wild variety in review approach, as it helped to keep inherently problematic careers interesting. That's not needed here, so the few unusually phrased reviews tend not to fit. Josh Arking looks at 'Time Cop' through the lens of fiction and it's a decent piece but an anomalous one. 'Lionheart' becomes another lesson in management skill by Joe LaLonde, which is traditional at this point but a much better fit in the other books than this. I only really appreciated one unusual take, which was Montilee Stormer's look at 'The Expendables 2' in the form of an obituary/threat.

And that leads me to Stephen Kessen, who's a friend of mine but I have to call him out here anyway because he either got really unlucky with the films he was tasked to review or he came in with the wrong approach. None of us got to see the big picture, as that was David Hayes's realm, so none of us could read the room, as it were. However, the general consensus is that Van Damme's films, in the main, are better than Seagal's and more varied than Norris's.

However, did Kessen like any of these? He points out that "Van Damme is ripe for parody", which may not be untrue but seems out of place here. That's where we all went in the Seagal book. 'The Hard Corps' may be the most positive Kessen review and he calls it "painfully average". Or the one he had to watch in Turkish, which he awarded a B+. However, even he finds it in his heart to offer a positive counterpoint to another writer's review of 'We Die Young' almost at the end of the book.

I had a much better time with the movies that I discovered through this project. Then again, I was already a confirmed fan of JCVD going in, having seen fifty or so of his films before this ever came up. Maybe I should lend a bunch to Kessen to give him a better grounding. Van Damme is no guilty pleasure. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by David C Hayes click here