Legionnaire

Legionnaire Review

I think this is direct to TV, I certainly never heard of it in the theaters.

Jean Claude Van Damme stars as a boxer who is supposed to throw a fight. When he meets his old girlfriend who he stiffed at their wedding he decides to run away with her. This doesn't work out and he decides to run away to join the French Foreign Legion. He knows that it is going to be bad going in but has to do it. I wish they would have explained a little more of exactly why he joined but that is really the only major flaw in the movie. The interaction between the main charcters who Jean Claude meets is the shining point in the movie. Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje's(Oz, Lost) southern accent was odd to hear. It didn't fully work for me but it is always great to see him on screen. Everybody is great and they stick by each other no matter what and everybody just does a brilliant acting job overall. Jean Claude's facial expressions looked stiff for the most part but he was the worst of the bunch and still did pretty good for himself.

While fighting battles with no of chance winning, some of Jean Claude's past catches up with him but the heart of the story is between the main characters and the story remains that way until the end which was a good choice.

I was completely surprised this wasn't your standard B-action flick. It is actually a very good movie with great sets and superb battle scenes. The cinematography in the desert is one of the finer points of the movie. No stylized action and the movie is all the better for it. We don't need to see Jean Claude doing super kicks and taking out everybody who has a gun with his bare 2 hands. We have seen that way too many times. You could tell it was right at this point in his career that he wanted to start doing better movies and he has put out about 4 good movies since this. Things are definitely looking up for the man who's first starring role was in Ng See Yuen's 'No Retreat, No Surrender'(AKA Karate Tiger). The movie gets a 3.5 from me but I can only pick a 3 or a 4. I don't know if I would watch it again since I am a hardcore action junkie but it was damn good movie.

This is a great DVD release from Sterling Entertainment. Picture is widecreened in a letterboxed format. Only 2-channel sound but still pretty good.

Special features include a 7 minute behind the scenes. It has an interview with one of the producers where he talks about Jean Claude. It also has an interview with the director and you get a little bit of a look behind the scenes.

There is a French Foreign Legion section and has a good interview with an historian. This is very good information wise and briefly tells how the Legion came to be and a bit about what happens after this movie. Best special feature on here. Also in this section is a very brief recent look at the FFL, text given on descriptions of weapons used, and a still gallery of filming the movie.

There is also a commentary with the writer of the movie.

The back of the DVD case also says that it has a commentary from a FFL expert and I was very disappointed not to find that on the disc.

Legionnaire Overview

Exiled to a video-only release when its distributor balked after the flop of Jean-Claude Van Damme's previous film Knock Off, this lavish adventure deserved a chance at theatrical success. Action icon Van Damme recasts himself as a tragic romantic hero in this entertaining old-fashioned adventure with a modern sensibility. "The Muscles from Brussels" is no Brando, but he acquits himself nicely as a cocky boxer who double-crosses a Marseilles mobster and joins the French Foreign Legion when his half-baked plan backfires with tragic consequences. Surrounded by a better than usual cast (including Steven Berkoff as a Teutonic drill sergeant, Jim Carter as the ruthless ganglord, and Nicholas Farrell as a gentleman soldier with a taste for gambling and a dark past), Van Damme's dour performance sometimes gets lost in the colorful characters around him. But that's okay--there's adventure enough to go around and he's willing to share it. The Marseilles scenes evoke a quaint movie past with their smoky bars and shadowy streets, but the film is reborn as an ambitious, stoic platoon drama in the sands of French Morocco. Legionnaire alludes to classic films from Beau Geste to Casablanca to Lawrence of Arabia, but ultimately marches its own macho course, reveling in testosterone-driven heroics and bonding-under-fire while acknowledging the irony of its colonial mission ("We're the intruders," realizes one soldier). It's a calculated risk for Van Damme (who also cowrote and coproduced), but if Legionnaire never quite grasps the epic scope it's reaching for, it remains one of his best films, a handsome, exciting, and surprisingly grim desert adventure. --Sean Axmaker