“Darkness of Man”

Rating: 8/10

Director: James Cullen Bressack

Writer: Alethea Cho and James Cullen Bressack

Style: Action / Thriller

Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

Rated: R

Review by Mike Szymanski

It’s great to see Jean-Claude Van Damme in a gritty crime drama after the rumors that he was hanging up his martial arts belt.

Apparently, if there’s anyone who can keep him going in the business, it’s prolific action director James Cullen Bressack, who directed a bunch of Bruce Willis’s last movies, revived Steven Seagal’s career, and finds a place to put OC (original cast) “90210” Shannen Doherty in a bunch of movies (like this one).

Bressack took an idea he and Van Damme came up with and wrote a film with Alethea Cho. The collaboration of JCB and JCVD winds up with a decent edge-of-your-seat crime drama that essentially defines a modern-day film noir movie.

I love film noir, but it’s tough to make a good one that’s not in black-and-white and keeps to the potboiler gritty crime world it’s supposed to be set in, and keeping to the rules of the genre. “Darkness of Man” fits into the elements that make up my favorite-ever modern noirs like “Body Heat,” “Chinatown” and “LA Confidential.”

With a grumbly voiceover, you hear Van Damme lament about how:

“LA is a city of lost people all in a hurry to go nowhere. Everybody comes here to find themselves, but if they are here they are already lost.”

How can you not love it already?

You come to find JCVD is Russell (Russ to his friends) Hatch who’s a washed-up former Interpol agent who gets too involved with one of his informants and falls in love with her, Esther (played by Chika Kanamoto).

When things go wrong, Esther makes Russ promise he will look out for her son, son, Jaden (played by a remarkably funny and talented Emerson Min). It turns out that Jaden’s kindly and meek grandfather Mr. Kim (Ji Yong Lee) is dealing with his cruel son Dan Hyun (Peter Jae) who has become a gangster in Koreatown. The family gets embroiled in a brutal gang war between the Koreans and Russians. Guess who’s caught in the middle?

JCVD is perfect for playing the ultimate fish-out-of-water disgruntled do-gooder with a heart and moral compass that always lands him in trouble. Even though everything and everyone has trampled on him (particularly his heart), this character keeps on going.

This time, Van Damme is challenged as an actor with becoming a father figure later in life and dealing with a precocious and volatile teen-ager. It gives the actor a chance to show a more sensitive side to his usual grizzled characters that he’s played in his last few films. He does become a father figure reluctantly, and seriously, but always with that sense of humor that the Belgian superstar is known for in his movies likes “Bloodsport,” “Universal Soldier” and “Timecop.”

His character is in an alcoholic haze in the first part of the film, but somehow he has a girlfriend named Claire (portrayed by Kristanna Loken who is just as hot as she ever was in “Terminator 3” and “BoodRayne.”)

She is a veterinarian in the film, which comes in handy because she’s often having to clean up her boyfriend after he gets beaten to a pulp. She is also the one who has a camera on her cat’s back. We find out she never heard Russ’s previous girl Esther.

“I work with animals all the time and behind your eyes I see a scared and sad teddy bear,” she tells Russ.

Also in the cast, mostly for comic relief it seems, is a grown up Spencer Breslin (you’ll recognize his face from “Return to Neverland,” “The Cat in the Hat” and a the second and third “Santa Clause” movies).

You will probably hate seeing him as an irritating goofy neighbor who sells drugs, and tries to endear himself to Russell.

Fighting scenes show that JCVD still has his martial arts prowess.

The fights are gruesome; in one, a guy’s stomach is sliced open and his guts spill out. Another particularly spectacular fight takes place in the back seat of a car after the driver is shot. And when Russ comes down the street with his swagger and rifle blazing, he shoots off the fingers of an irritating Russian mobster who keeps asking “Who are you?”

Look for some very cool cameos throughout the film, including JCVD’s son Kris Van Damme playing one of the Russian thugs named Igor.

“Lady Dragon” martial arts actress Cynthia Rothrock appears as a nurse, Shannen Doherty is a teacher, and Eric Roberts is standing in line at a taco stand. The director, Bressack, is himself in a cameo as Gordon.

Rapper Kirk “Sticky Fingaz” Jones appears in a few scenes as a police friend of Russell’s who tries to help him out. Sticky Fingaz also wrote and performed in one of the songs written for the film.

The music is superb — almost like its own character in the movie. Appropriately signaling danger and tension, the music was compiled by Timothy Stuart Jones and James T. Sale.

Bressack also wrote a few songs, including “Mistakes” and “Racks on 100s.”

Stay until after the credits role so you can see a follow-up scene as a few of the characters go out for ice cream. It’s a cute way to see how things worked out.

In a note of self confession, I am in this movie as a background person. Near the beginning when JCVD goes into the Pool Hall, I’m seated at the bar. I am a blurry figure drinking in the background over Sticky Fingaz’s shoulder.

And, I’m listed in the credits, but my name is spelled wrong, so it doesn’t really matter.

I got on the set because I know Bressack since the beginning of his career in horror films. I feel like I have sort-of discovered him by raving over his movie and declared he is a director to take note of, and he still is.

I volunteered to spend a day watching him work as an extra, and I was delighted to have done it. It took place in an old club hall in the San Fernando Valley.

Van Damme is still very handsome — I found out on the set that he’s actually one month younger than me, at 63. He still commands a a shower scene when he’s pounding the walls and crying.

Van Damme’s character says, “I have seen the darkness of man. I must not become it.”

Well, I’ve not only seen, but been in “Darkness of Man” and you must see it.

“Darkness of Man” was released on May 21 and you can get it here: www.sonypictures.com/movies/darknessofman

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