Bloodsport (1988)
Directed by Newt Arnold
An American Army Major goes AWOL to Hong Kong for an outlawed martial arts contest called the Kumite.
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What critics compared Bloodsport to
Putting aside the movie's questionable message for a moment, Never Back Down is compulsively watchable in the same way those old Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicles like Bloodsport and Lionheart were.
Once upon a time, their cornucopia of loveable low-quality movies — Bloodsport (1988), Cobra (1986), and the Chuck Norris Delta Force franchise to name a few — planned to welcome a James Cameron directed Spider-man picture into their midst. Kraven the Hunter feels like a cousin to that lost opportunity.
He won’t be mistaken for Wong Kar Wei very soon, or even Newt Arnold, of “Bloodsport” (1988), but Keanu Reeve’s directorial career gets off to a decent start with “Man of Tai Chi,” a hit-and-miss martial arts allegory about good and evil and kicking butt.
The boys' father, a career military man specializing in psychological warfare, believes in tough martial-arts love only slightly less punishing than what Jean-Claude Van Damme endured in "Bloodsport."
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(And what do you mean, Was he in "Enter the Dragon"?
The many references to past JCVD triumphs like Kickboxer, Timecop and, most garishly, Bloodsport don’t help.
The savvy, sometimes meta comedy introduces Richard in a classic Van Damme pose to get the fans cheering (later, Richard walks into a room with a “Bloodsport” poster on the wall and comments that its star — one Jean-Claude Van Damme — is a “real man”).
Perhaps the key to these weird plot mechanics lies with co-writer Sheldon Lettich, a former Marine himself, and a veteran scribe and occasional helmer of multiple Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicles (including “Bloodsport” and “Double Impact”).