What happens when an action superstar delivers one of his best-ever action flicks, but no one bothers to see it? What if it did so badly that it forever affected his box office clout and movie star trajectory, but actually happened to be a great movie that just wasn’t appreciated at the time? That’s exactly what happened with Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Sudden Death, one of the biggest-budget movies of his career, but also one of the most ill-timed, with it being released in the middle of a brutal Christmas box office corridor. It ended up being somewhat forgotten over time, but it’s interesting to go back and revisit movies from the nineties that once seemed unexceptional but, over time, improved with age. Such a case could be made for Sudden Death…
Flashback to the fall of 1994. Jean-Claude Van Damme is sitting at the absolute peak of his global stardom. He’d successfully transcended his humble roots in low-budget martial arts films for Cannon to break through in studio-level action flicks like Universal Soldier and Hard Target. But it was the release of Timecop in the fall of 1994 that made many think he could be the next Schwarzenegger, with the film pulling in over $100 million worldwide and earning him more than respectable reviews. It was the exact moment when things could have pivoted permanently for JCVD.
In a lot of ways, this was an incredibly similar trajectory to what happened to Steven Seagal with Under Siege a few years earlier, when he could have launched himself into the stratosphere—but found all his hard-earned momentum wasted when his follow-up proved to be his embarrassing passion project, On Deadly Ground.
For Van Damme, it was his next film, Street Fighter, which only came out a few months later, that caused irreparable damage to his career. It wasn’t only that it was a fundamentally bad movie, but its PG-13 rating alienated his hardcore fans and instantly diminished his heat. But what really hurt him behind the scenes was his crippling cocaine habit, which notoriously was out of control on the Street Fighter set, with JCVD himself once noting that he spent something like $10,000 on coke a week at the time.
Yet, what’s a tragedy is that JCVD, even if he was a raging drug addict at the time, was able to completely pull it together in 1995 for Sudden Death. The film would luckily reunite him with director Peter Hyams, who had just directed him in Timecop and proved to be the one American director who truly knew exactly how to play to Van Damme’s strengths.
Hyams is what one might call a consummate journeyman director. While never a massive household name, he was one of those Hollywood guys who was insanely proficient, with him having probably never directed a truly great film, but a surprising number of very good ones, including Capricorn One, Outland, The Star Chamber, 2010, Running Scared, Timecop, and, of course, Sudden Death.
What’s interesting about Hyams’ take on JCVD is how his movies humanized him. JCVD, with his massive muscles and handsome good looks, usually played pretty uncomplicated, pristine good guys. But in both Hyams movies, he has real pathos. In Timecop, he’s tortured by the murder of his wife and the fact that he can’t go back and save her. Sudden Death is very similar, in that he plays a Pittsburgh fireman who seemingly accidentally crushed a child while trying to save her in the middle of a roaring fire, and is now left traumatized with a fractured family.
If you want to nitpick the script, which is credited to Gene Quintano—a screenwriter who has written an astounding number of bad movies, including Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, Police Academy 3, and Police Academy 4, but also wrote the underrated Operation Dumbo Drop—you can easily take issue with the aggressively Belgian Van Damme playing a local Pittsburgh fireman.
It doesn’t make much sense, with him having a name—Darren McCord—that makes it plain the movie was written for someone else, as indeed it was, since Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Willis were all offered the movie first. They do toss in a line about him being from Quebec, but as someone actually from Quebec, I can tell you the chance of running into a French Canadian named Darren McCord is pretty remote.
Anyway, the premise is straight out of the Die Hard playbook, with it having a pretty similar plot, in that Van Damme’s McCord is trying to save a building full of people from murderous hostage takers who actually just plan to blow the whole thing up and kill everyone inside anyway. The only twist—and it turns out to be a fantastic one—is that instead of an office building, it’s set in a packed hockey arena right in the middle of the Stanley Cup playoffs!
And oh yeah, one of the hostages is the Vice President of the United States, but JCVD doesn’t really give a shit—he just wants to save his daughter, who’s been taken hostage because her older brother is a little shit. Seriously, this kid, played by Sleepless in Seattle’s Ross Malinger, is terrible, frequently bullying his sister and calling his dad a loser to his face. At the end of the movie, when he’s briefly in jeopardy, it will be shocking how little you actually care—although JCVD’s daughter is a genuinely likable kid.
The bad guys in this are led by Powers Boothe as Joshua Foss, a rogue Secret Service agent who, along with his cohorts, wants secret government slush funds liquidated or he’ll kill hostages at the end of each period, and simply blow the stadium sky-high at the end of the game—something he actually plans to do anyway because he’s presented as completely sadistic, unlike the more calculating but professional Hans Gruber in Die Hard.
Detractors of the movie do have a point when they poke holes in it. A lot of it doesn’t make sense. What I don’t get is how JCVD’s everyday firefighter is so deadly, being an absolute master in hand-to-hand combat, bomb defusing, and advanced weaponry.
Yet, there are so many cool scenes that make you forget the leaps in logic. One of the most famous perfectly sums up why JCVD, in his absolute prime, rocked. It’s the sequence where he fights the team mascot, Iceburgh. In the scene, Hyams has fun with the sheer spectacle of Van Damme fighting a giant bird, but he also allows his hero to take a serious, bone-crunching beating.
This is notable because this is a massive problem a lot of modern action heroes have had over the years. Would Jason Statham allow himself to be handed a major beating by a mascot, and a woman to boot—in this case played by stuntwoman Faith Minton? No on both counts. Ditto Vin Diesel. The Rock might allow it, but only if he got in the exact same number of hits. Seagal would have had an absolute ego meltdown on set. JCVD was more like Stallone or Schwarzenegger, in that he was fine taking a beating because he knew a fight sequence where the hero is completely infallible is inherently boring.
The film also has a tremendously exciting finale, with JCVD storming the executive box where all the hostages are held and laying waste to most of the remaining villains. Then, just when you think it’s over, his daughter gets snatched again, leading to a crazy battle on top of the Pittsburgh Civic Arena, complete with real stunts, crashing helicopters, and high-altitude peril.
One thing worth noting is that the access they had to the Civic Arena, and to actual NHL teams, was second to none. This can be explained by the fact that the movie was produced by Howard Baldwin, the actual owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins, with his wife, Karen Baldwin, actually having come up with the original story and pitch this was based on.
Hyams and company had total access to the arena and the players, with many players appearing as themselves. All-star Luc Robitaille had actually taken an acting class with Karen Baldwin, so he actually got a bit of genuine dialogue with JCVD, in addition to being the favorite player of the main character’s son.
It’s worth noting that the game itself is a fictional rematch of the 1992 Stanley Cup Final, where the Penguins played the Chicago Blackhawks. They had wanted to actually shoot during the real-life season opener, which was slated to be between those exact same teams, but the 1994 NHL lockout happened, delaying the season for months and forcing the production to choreograph its own games with minor league players and a stadium full of local extras.
I wonder if any modern sports franchise would allow itself to be displayed so prominently, especially in a movie where so many innocent stadium employees die. Back in the nineties, people were far more accepting, to the point that in 1977’s Black Sunday, they were allowed to film at the actual Super Bowl despite it being entirely about a terrorist attack. In the years post-September 11th, this kind of gritty realism was abandoned completely.
Speaking of gritty realism—well, OK, maybe not. We have to talk about THE SCENE. Which scene is this? The part when JCVD poses as a goalie and MAKES A SAVE.
So here’s what happens. JCVD is being chased around the arena and has to hide in plain sight. He ends up knocking out the team goalie, stealing his uniform, and posing as him on the ice. He’s put into goal—now, usually this would be a disaster, but earlier in the film, when he’s chatting with Luc Robitaille, there’s a line about how he used to be a goalie back home in Quebec, and if you know anything about francophones from Quebec, hockey is in their blood.
So, JCVD is able to make a GAME-SAVING block before starting a brawl on the ice. It’s a classic moment that—again—I think only Van Damme could have pulled off.
While Sudden Death has a lot going for it, I will admit that it has a few shortcomings. One I think is fair is that Powers Boothe, while an excellent actor, doesn’t really suit the specific energy of his role. Boothe, who sadly passed away in 2017, was best at playing villains who, despite being bad, had some deep pathos or twisted honor. Take, for example, his classic role in Extreme Prejudice. He’s just not great at playing someone so cartoonishly over-the-top and sadistic.
It feels like he’s play-acting against his own natural gravitas. The movie needed someone smarmy, and the perfect choice for the era would have been James Woods. Indeed, Woods himself was offered the role and almost took it, but he passed on it after being unsatisfied with the direction of the script rewrites. The pairing of James Woods and JCVD might have pushed this into absolute classic action movie territory.
This isn’t a dig at Boothe in any way—I should emphasize that. He is superb in Southern Comfort, Extreme Prejudice, The Emerald Forest, and Rapid Fire, as well as on Deadwood—it’s just that a character this cartoonish didn’t suit his strengths.
The rest of the bad guys are pretty dull, too, with the movie severely needing a cool secondary villain, like Karl in Die Hard. That’s why Under Siege had Gary Busey! The closest we get is Dorian Harewood as a turncoat Secret Service agent, who’s a huge red herring and does this weird thing where—once his face is burned—he has a monster-movie jump-scare scene. As if being given life-threatening burns somehow made him stronger.
Ultimately, Sudden Death was a box office dud. They opened it during the crowded Christmas season, which seems like a dumb idea, as it had to go up directly against Jumanji. I guess the idea was that it was counterprogramming, but Universal had been burned on this with Van Damme the same way the year before, when they released Street Fighter, which had way more hype and underperformed, with the movie topping out at $33 million.
Even worse, there were two other kick-ass movies targeting older male audiences in theaters that exact same weekend—and both ended up becoming undisputed classics: Michael Mann’s Heat, which scratches the crime-action itch even better than this one, and Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys.
Next to them, Sudden Death didn’t have a prayer. It opened in an embarrassing eighth place at the box office and tapped out with a weak $20 million total domestic gross against its $35 million budget. Like a lot of JCVD’s movies, it did incredibly well on cable and VHS rentals, but it started his rapid decline in the industry.
In truth, he’d become overexposed, with him contributing a memorably lame cameo to the post-Super Bowl episode of Friends just a month later. He followed it up with perhaps the worst choice possible—his martial arts historical epic The Quest, which he also directed. It performed slightly better than Sudden Death, but nowhere near the level of Timecop, and it was poorly received by critics.
His next movie, Maximum Risk, didn’t do any better at the box office. He then teamed up with Dennis Rodman on Double Team, the first of two movies he made with legendary Hong Kong director Tsui Hark, but it was much mocked and an absolute flop.
It was also around this time that Van Damme came clean about his major drug issues, and stories about his erratic on-set antics became widespread. After another box office flop with Knock Off, his movies started going direct-to-video, first with Legionnaire, then with Inferno—or, as it’s called in some territories, Desert Heat—and he never really came back to the studio mainstream after that.
In a way, though, this decline was entirely inevitable, as many of his contemporaries fell off at the exact same time. Steven Seagal would go direct-to-video around the same period, although at least he was given another shot at theatrical films with Exit Wounds in 2001. Sylvester Stallone would admit the late nineties and early 2000s were the absolute worst period of his career, and even Arnold Schwarzenegger would suffer an increasing number of flops like End of Days and The 6th Day as the industry shifted toward CGI spectacles.
JCVD—for the record—actually honed his craft and did perhaps some of the best dramatic acting of his career during his straight-to-video era. He was terrific in two atypical movies he made for Hong Kong director Ringo Lam, both of which were huge improvements on the first movie they made together—Maximum Risk.
One was Replicant, where JCVD played both the good guy and bad guy, with him playing the good-guy clone of an evil serial killer. His follow-up, In Hell, was even better—but he probably gave his best action performance in the underseen Wake of Death.
And then, there was the highly acclaimed meta-film JCVD, which should have been his ticket back to the big time, but didn’t quite pan out, with it followed by films that didn’t live up to it, although he got good reviews for the short-lived Amazon series Jean-Claude Van Johnson. He would also return to the big screen to play the memorably named villain Jean Vilain in The Expendables 2.
While Sudden Death did, unfortunately, freeze his theatrical career, looking back thirty years later, it stands as a fantastic, practical-stunt-driven blast of mid-’90s action that deserves to be pulled out of the penalty box.