Black Eagle, 1988.
Directed by Eric Karson.
Starring Shô Kosugi, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Doran Clark, Bruce French, Gene Davis and Vladimir Skomarovsky.
SYNOPSIS:
A top CIA agent investigates a US military plane that has crashed somewhere over Europe but comes face to face with Soviet agents operating in the area.
Much like the 1986 The Karate Kid knock-off No Retreat, No Surrender, Black Eagle wasn’t always a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie; it was a movie that just happened to feature The Muscles from Brussels, albeit briefly, in a secondary role and before he was a huge star. The real star of Black Eagle is Shô Kosugi, a name that may not mean much to those not into 1980s martial arts movie but to many the man is an action film legend, appearing in such Cannon Films classics as Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja and the hilariously naff yet brilliant Ninja III: The Domination.
In Black Eagle, Kosugi plays Ken Tani, a CIA operative who is sent to Malta to salvage a top-secret laser guidance system from a US Air Force aircraft that has crashed into the ocean. However, Soviet KGB agents, led by Colonel Vladimir Klimenko (Vladimir Skomarovsky) and his top assassin Andrei (Van Damme), are also after the tracking device and are scoping the area to find the missing plane, setting the scene for a showdown between the two martial arts giants.
More of a spy thriller in the James Bond mould rather than a high-kicking action-fest, Black Eagle is a film that probably looked pretty good on paper in the planning stages but unfortunately the end result is something less than spectacular. What should have been a simple plot manages to twist itself up into a messy family drama involving the CIA putting Ken Tani’s kids on Malta with him – note: with him, while he battles the Russians over a US military laser tracking system, because the CIA are in the habit of putting young children on missions with their parents in potentially lethal situations – as a retainer so he agrees to do what they ask. Naturally they get kidnapped but they’re not in any danger as the Soviet kidnappers are so badly written that asking to go to the toilet to set up an obvious escape attempt seems to confuse them.
Black Eagle sits in amongst Van Damme’s body of work – and Kosugi’s, to a lesser extent – in the same way that Raw Deal sits in Arnie’s, i.e. it feels like a movie that was written with other actors in mind and sticks out for all the wrong reasons. Jean-Claude Van Damme has form playing a villainous heavy but he is wasted here, having only a few short lines to speak and not having a great deal to do except look pretty good in a flashy suit, while Shô Kosugi proves why he is a better ninja than he is a spy – always great to look at in the action scenes but he isn’t the greatest actor in the world – or even in this film – and his limited grasp of English makes his line delivery very painful to listen to, and given that he has most of the dialogue in the script then it’s a bit of a problem. His fight scenes with Van Damme are the obvious highlight of the film and offer a brief bit of excitement towards the climax but the cop-out ending spoils what was the only bit of the film worth hanging around for. The conversion to Blu-ray makes the film look better than it ever did and Van Damme/Kosugi completists will buy it regardless, but unfortunately if you’re not already one of the faithful then this isn’t the film that is going to convert you as it’s a tad long, a bit silly and, worst of all for an action movie, quite dull.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Chris Ward
https://youtu.be/8HTiU_hrLms?list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5
Originally published May 6, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
