The Quest (1996)

The Quest (1996)

Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Roger Moore, James Remar, Aki Aleong, Janet Gunn, Jack McGee, Abdel Qissi, Louis Mandylor
Director: Jean-Claude Van Damme
Action Director: Steven Lambert, Peter Malota

 

Following the lukewarm response to Sudden Death--it did mediocre business stateside, but did well abroad and on home video--Jean-Claude Van Damme returned to more familiar territory with his next film. The Quest was his return to the tournament martial arts movie, which subgenre had made him famous in the first place. In a lot of ways, The Quest feels like a Van Damme's own apology for Street Fighter, which was less an adaptation of the video game and more of a parody of action movies from the previous decade, dressed up in the colorful clothing of that game's characters. This one definitely feels more like a Street Fighter adaptation, which a more palpable international flavor of the tournament's participants and SE Asian setting[1].

The film is told in flashback by an aged Van Damme--considering the timeframe here, Van Damme should be in his 90s at this point, making him the fittest nonagenarian in existence. During the roaring Twenties, Christopher DuBois (Van Damme) was a street clown/thief who had a bunch of orphans under his wing. One day, his kids steal money from a local mobster, which he hopes will allow them to buy themselves a better life. Things go awry when the mobsters show up, Tommy guns a-blazin' (these guys show no restraint for children). One of the kids takes a bullet and DuBois finds himself forced to flee.

He ends up on a ship belonging to some gun smugglers, whose trajectory takes them to Southeast Asian. The ship is not too far away from Thailand when it is beset by pirates, led by Captain Edgar Dobbs (Roger Moore). The two save each other during the melee between Dobbs' men and the duplicitous smugglers, and Dobbs takes DuBois under his wing. Well, not really. As honest as you'd expect a pirate to be, Dobbs is a con man first and foremost, and sells DuBois as a laborer to Khao (Aki Aleong of Braddock: Missing in Action 3), who runs a place called Muay Thai Island. There, the Muscles from Brussells is trained to be a professional Thai boxer, among other things.

Six months later, Dobbs and his right-hand man, Harry Smythe (Jack McGee of Gangster Squad and Drive Angry), are lounging around in Bangkok when they make the acquaintance of an American journalist, Carrie Newton (Janet Gunn, of the 90s show Silk Stockings). While escorting her to a Muay Thai match, they run into DuBois, now a trained fighter. While he's obviously not happy that they lied to him and left him to fend for himself on an island full of Thai boxers, he's not going to break them in half...just yet. DuBois has learned about a tournament known as the Ghang-Gheng that is held in Tibet every few generations or so--Khao's own son, Phang (Jen Sung, of Kung Pow: Enter the Fist), has been invited to participate. DuBois also wants to fight in the tournament, and believes that Dobbs' skills as a conman will help him realize that dream. Once Dobbs learns that the prize is a large dragon made of solid gold, he's more than willing to go along with the idea. To that end, they pose as valets for the American fighter, champion boxer Maxie Devine (James Remar, of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation). With Newton in tow to document the experience, they all set off in search of the Lost City to participate in the Ghang-Gheng...

The Quest certainly takes the scenic route to becoming a Bloodsport rip-off, as many critics of the day denounced it of being. This is both a blessing and drawback to the movie. For one, the Christopher DuBois character is certainly more developed with a fuller backstory than Frank Dux had in this film's inspiration. And as DuBois's journey...or quest...takes him from New York to Siam to Tibet, the film definitely has an epic adventure feeling to it. The varied Thai location settings are definitely a plus, too--one of the few things that critics enjoyed. The flaws stem from the sprawling narrative stuffed into a 90-minute running time. While we see DuBois laboring on Muay Thai island, we never actually see him train. As a result, the fact that he can go from street acrobat to the World's Greatest Fighter in just six months is hardly believable. Moreover, the Janet Gunn plays the same character Leah Ayres did in Bloodsport, but her character is mainly left to the sidelines. Compare with Ayre's character whose feelings about the Kumite range from curious to repulsed to genuinely concerned (to the point she was willing to try to stop the tournament).

Van Damme doesn't get to do as much acting here (and no jokes about him not doing any acting in any of his films). He more or less reacts to what's going on around him until the end, when he finally takes a stand for Dobbs and Harry. Most the acting duties fall on the shoulders of Roger Moore and Aki Aleong, the latter of whom displays genuine emotion in his limited scenes. Moore does channel James Bond into his suave, charismatic pirate character, and you can see why he had been chosen to play the secret agent two decades prior. In his memoirs, Moore did not have a lot of good things to say about his participation in this film. In fact, he more or less said, "My mom taught me that if you can't say anything nice about anyone, don't say anything at all. Next chapter."

What I do like about The Quest is that it essentially portrays the entire tournament: elimination round, quarter-finals, semi-finals and final match. That is fifteen fights right there, plus a handful of shorter fights during the first half. But since the tournament doesn't start until we're almost an hour into the movie, it means that many of the fights are rather short. That is a shame, since Van Damme put together a strong roster of different fighters for this film:

Mongolian Fighter - Abdel Qissi - Boxing
Chinese Fighter - Peter Wong - Wushu, Sanshou, Wing Chun
Japanese Fighter - Kitao Koji - Sumo, Professional Wrestling
Thai Fighter - Jen Sung - Chinese kung fu
German Fighter - Habby Heske - Boxing, Judo, Karate, Muay Thai
Brazilian Fighter - César Carneiro - Capoeira
Scottish Fighter - Michael Ian Lambert (Black Mask and Unleashed) - Tae Kwon Do, Kickboxing, Boxing
Greek Fighter - Stefanos Miltsakakis - Wrestling, Pengration
Russian Fighter - Brick Bronsky - Professional Wrestling
Okinawan Fighter - Yip Choi-Nam - Wing Chun, Muay Thai, Praying Mantis
Korean Fighter - Ong Soo-Han (Bloodsport 2 and Dragon: the Bruce Lee Story) - Tae Kwon Do
Turkish Fighter - Azdine Nouri - Karate, Aikido, Ninjitsu
Spanish Fighter - Peter Malota (Double Impact and The Order) - Tae Kwon Do
French Fighter - Takis Trigellis - Kickboxing, Tae Kwon Do, Muay Thai
African Fighter - Winston Ellis - Ying Jao Pai (Eagle Claw), Muay Thai

Van Damme's fights tend to be the longest ones, although it's Peter Wong (Future X-Cops, The Warlords) who steals the show as the acrobatic Chinese fighter who uses a different animal style for each of his fights. Abdel Qissi, who played the fearsome Atilla in Lionheart, returns to the main villain post as the brutal Mongolian bruiser. His fight with Van Damme is the longest, although it doesn't quite feel as long when you notice that the sequence spends as much time showing the spectators moving about from one part of the Lost City to other as they follow the fighters, as it does the combatants themselves. It plays like a rematch of their scuffle from Lionheart, although with less fancy kicks from Van Damme as you might expect.

You can see the Street Fighter influence in a lot of these fighters. Kitao Koji's sumo wrestler is obviously the E. Honda stand-in. Peter Malota's suave Spaniard fighter is this film's Vega. The Russian wrestler, played by former pro-wrestler and Troma alumni Brick Bronsky, is the movie's Zangief. Peter Wong plays this movie's Fei Long. Abdel Qissi is like Balrog and Sagat rolled into one. That would make Van Damme and Jen Sung's Phang this film's Ken and Ryu--a Caucasian and an Asian who studied the same style under the same master. And I guess you could say that German military fighter Habby Heske is the Guile of the exercise.

The Quest is one of the Van Damme movies that I caught in theaters[2]. As such, it does have some sentimental value for me. It works to some extent as a stealth Street Fighter adaptation, and I can see Van Damme's willingness to court viewers this way after so many of them were disappointed with the official adaptation they got. There is enough fighting on the whole to justify a viewing, even if most of them are over before they even begin. All in all, I think it's a "Pretty Good" Van Damme movie, even though I hold it in personal high regard myself.

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[1] - The Ghang-Gheng tournament is supposedly set in Tibet, but it's obvious that the Lost City is located in the Thai or Laotian highlands. Those are Hmong people living in the city; I recognize the clothing.

[2] - The other three were Timecop; Double Team; and Knock-Off.