Two Scott Adkins Films Directed by Ernie Barbarash

Assassination Games (2011)
Aka: Weapon

 

Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Scott Adkins, Ivan Kaye, Valentin Teodosiu, Alin Panc, Kevin Chapman, Serban Celea, Michael Higgs, Kris Van Varenberg, Marija Karan, Bianca Brigitte Van Varenberg
Director: Ernie Barbarash
Action Director: Stanimir Stamatov

 

A lot of fans of both Van Damme and Scott Adkins were disappointed with the results of their first face-off, Isaac Florentine’s The Shepherd: Border Patrol. The announcement of a second team-up, Assassination Games, gave fans hope that the film would rise above what they thought was the mediocrity of a film made by people who could surely do better. The director was to be Ernie Barbarash, best known for his work on the cult favorite Cube series—he wrote and produced Cube²: Hypercube and took on all three duties (writing, producing and directing) for Cube Zero. At the very least, fans could expect an exceptionally violent action thriller.

JCVD plays Vincent Brazil, a professional hitman based in Bucharest, Romania. He lives alone in a luxurious apartment hidden inside a shabby project, spending his free time playing the violin and keeping his pad as neat and tidy as possible. In fact, he’s such a neat freak that it becomes comical at times.

Scott Adkins plays Roland Flint, a retired hitman who was in the employ of Interpol? It is always interesting when movies in general portray Interpol as a law enforcement agency, when they mainly an crime intelligence agency who leave the work of actually arresting people to the local authorities; they mainly just gather and share information. Well, this movie actually understands that and points out that Interpol has been hiring assassins to wipe out criminals in places where the police are too corrupt to actually do anything. In any case, Flint lives in the Ukraine, where he takes care of his catatonic wife, Anna (JCVD’s daughter, Bianca).

The new Interpol chief, Wilson Herrod (Serban Celea, of Dragonheart 3 and Anaconda 3), is facing allegations of corruption and wants to eliminate any evidence of Interpol’s dabbling in for-hire killings. The two men behind the contracts, Godfrey (Avengement’s Michael Higgs) and Schell (JCVD’s own son, Kris), decide that Flint needs to be eliminated. To that end, they arrange for Romanian crime lord Polo Yakur (Ivan Keye, of “The Vikings”) to be released from prison. Polo and his men are the men who raped and beat Bianca and left her the way she is. That is enough to get Flint riled up and back in the game.

Both Roland and Vincent are given the same assignment to kill Polo, unbeknownst to the other. Both try to kill their target at the same time, but end up getting in each other’s way. The only person dead by the time the smoke clears is Polo’s brother. So now Polo wants revenge on his would-be assassins, and those two will not only have to contend with the corrupt Interpol agents, but with each other, too.

Despite the set-up, there is not a whole lot of action in Assassination Games. There are a few outbursts of violence and brutality, and even a bit of rape and torture, but this is mainly a story driven film. There is a sub-plot involving Vincent and a prostitute (The Rite’s Marija Karan) who lives in the next apartment over, through which the former gains much of his lost humanity. The film is constantly jumping back and forth between the four groups of characters as they try to out-manoeuver each other, although we know that Vincent and Roland will ultimately join forces. As good as Barbarash and his team make the film look, I do think his approach to the material (i.e. downplaying the action) is ultimately disappointing.

The action is brought to you by Stanimir Stamatov, a veteran stuntman who has also doubled for Van Damme on several occasions. Stamatov has some experience in the fight choreography and action direction department, including on the 2011 Conan remake and the more recent fem-empowerment action film The Princess. Sadly, he doesn’t have much opportunity to show off his talents. The highlight is a brief scuffle between Scott Adkins and Van Damme, which happens about halfway into the movie. Adkins shows off some of his bootwork, but not much. The climax is rushed and ultimately a disappointment—we want to see our heroes fight, not kill everybody with a remote-controlled machine gun. As I said, the film looks good and is generally well acted, but falls below the action potential of its stars.

 

  

Abduction (2019)
Aka: Twilight Zodiac

 

Starring: Scott Adkins, Andy On, Truong Ngoc Anh, Lily Ji, Aki Aleong, Daniel Whyte, Mike Leeder, Brahim Chab, Paul W. He, Philippe Joly
Director: Ernie Barbarash
Action Director: Tim Man

 

Oh, another Scott Adkins film directed by Ernie Barbarash. Assassination Games looked good, but was underwhelming. Barbarash had better luck with Adkins’s contemporary, Michael Jai White, on Falcon Rising, which a lot of martial arts fans says is one of White’s best movies. He also did a good job with Van Damme’s Six Bullets, which I’ve reviewed here. But…Abduction is a science fiction film produced by Roger Corman…so is the result closer to Cube? Or Black Mask 2?

The film opens in a strange chamber where a bunch of lifeless bodies are being dumped. A hulking man (Mike Leeder) is going from body to body, removing a spider-like robot from the back of the corpses’ necks. One of the dead bodies isn’t quite dead. That would be Quinn, played by Scott Adkins. Quinn slips away from Hulking Man and makes his way through the place to another chamber, where a bunch of people are being kept in cages with strange collars around their necks. Quinn recognizes one of the people as Lucy, his daughter. Before he can free her, a hooded figure appears and sends a bunch of mind-controlled fighters to stop him. Quinn dispatches his opponents, but is knocked out of the building, which is actually a castle in another dimension!

Quinn mysteriously emerges from a fountain in modern-day Saigon, where he wanders around with amnesia before he is ultimately arrested and placed in a psychiatric hospital. He is placed under the responsibility of Dr. Anna (Truong Ngoc Anh, of Rise and Tracer). She ultimately discovers that Quinn, for all his youth, had been around in the mid-80s when he claimed his daughter was kidnapped by aliens. So, why does he look so young?

While this is going on, a former Chinese soldier-turned-hitman named Conner (Andy On, of Invisible Target and Bad Blood) is dealing with a disappearance of his own. His wife, Maya (Lily Ji, of Skiptrace and Pacific Rim: Uprising), has disappeared. Does it have anything to do with the local Eurotrash mobsters whom he murdered? Or do his employers, Dao (Aki Aleong, of The Quest) and Sonny (Paul W. He, of Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), know something that Conner doesn’t?

Abduction is indeed a strange duck. It gives us interdimensional aliens who, according to some characters, are responsible for introducing Taoist iconography (like the bagua, or the Eight Trigram) to the Chinese. They also drain people’s qi for their own purposes, either to stay alive or to power their technology. Plus, robot spiders, hooded figures that belong in a Dark City rip-off, martial arts, the Russian mob, and giant crystalline monsters!

Despite being an American-Chinese co-production, the film doesn’t always look as good as it should. Ernie Barbarash is certainly no Alex Proyas. The CGI landscape of the castle is on the level of a SyFy original film. Some of the optical effects at the end are good, however. The main problem is that whenever the two main characters aren’t throwing punches and kicks, the film feels a bit slow, especially in the middle when Andy On is running around trying to make sense of the film’s story.

Frequent Scott Adkins collaborator Tim Man handled the action and does a great job, for the most part. The opening fight places Adkins against a bunch of fighters armed with poles and nooses. It’s a well-choreographed fight and starts off the film perfectly. Adkins also gets to beat up a pair of Vietnamese cops with nightsticks in a short, but sweet fight. After that, Adkins is more or less sidelined while Andy On picks up the slack. Andy On has certainly grown as a screen fighter since his early Black Mask 2 days (which also pit him against Scott Adkins) and he uses a lot of his grappling and groundfighting moves that he picked up in films like Unbeatable and Special ID. On has a prolonged shootout in a hotel with Russian gangsters that is the first highlight of the movie and worth the price of rental.

The real showstopper, however, is when Adkins and On throwdown near the end as we viewers hoped they would. It’s the perfect mixture of crazy footwork and MMA, with Adkins’s character being super-powered by this point. So be prepared for Adkins’s jumping back kicks and killer spin boots. Andy On matches him move for move in this sequence. It doesn’t quite reach the level of Special ID or Once Upon a Time in Shanghai, but it certainly a great showcase for On’s skills. It’s almost enough to forgive the movie for forgetting to have a proper climax…almost.

These reviews are a part of "September of Scott" at It's a Beautiful Film Worth Fighting For: