By Geno McGahee
In 1986, Jean-Claude Van Damme turned some heads with his performance in the action film NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER as the evil kickboxing master. He would get his shot as the hero in 1988 in BLOODSPORT and followed it up with KICKBOXER in 1989. He was on a roll and it didn’t stop in 1990 as he starred in LIONHEART. With a budget of 6 million, the film would return 24 million, making it quite a success.
We begin with a drug deal gone bad and one of the guys being beaten and set on fire. You can’t start a film better than that. The guy doesn’t die and he gets rushed to the hospital where he is badly burned. His wife Helene (Lisa Pelikan) and young daughter, Nicole (Ashley Johnson), leave the hospital and let the poor burnt guy there alone. He starts screaming for his brother, but his brother couldn’t hear him, considering that he was in California and his brother was in France.
Lyon (Van Damme), the brother in the French military, gets the news that his brother was burnt to shit. He asks to go see him and it’s refused, but he goes A.W.O.L. and heads to the USA to find out what happened and get some shit done. While there, he meets up with Joshua (Harrison Page), a guy that is desperately looking to make some money and sees potential with Lyon. Lyon needs to get money to afford a trip to California and Joshua proposes an idea to get him enough money and then some. This is a Van Damme movie…so you know the idea is fighting.
They head over to a parking garage and meet up with Cynthia (Deborah Rennard) and Russell (Brian Thompson). Cynthia runs the show and Russell is the Arnold Schwarzenegger lookalike guy that we see in a bunch of films. We see the first fighter, which is some generic biker guy in leather and he wins his fight with ease and Lyon watches on. After the fight, Lyon agrees to fight the guy and it gets pretty funny pretty fast. The leather guy leans in to Lyon and says “I don’t know whether to fight you or fuck you,” noting how handsome Lyon was. Van Damme came up with this story and probably considered himself majorly fuckable. I’m no pecker checker, but I can admire beauty and the guy is a beauty but I wish he didn’t show his ass so much. It must be that karate stuff that gives him that muscular ass but I know he has it, he knows he has it, the rest of the viewers knows he has it…we don’t need any more Van Damme bare ass scenes.
After Lyon beats the leather guy in seconds, Cynthia tries to convince him to join her fighting circuit. He declines and notes that he has to make his way to California. She tells him that there is a fighting circuit there too and she could hook him up and make him all sorts of money. Joshua takes Lyon aside and tries to get him to agree to it, but he’s hesitant.
Lyon makes it to the hospital and finds out that his brother died. There was no way that the guy was going to survive. He was so fucking burnt up. Even if he lived, he wouldn’t be able to get any anymore. There is no way his wife would service a burnt up cock. I can’t see that happening and, considering his injuries, it stands to reason that his junk might not work.
After leaving the hospital, Lyon heads over to his sister-in-law’s apartment and meets up with young Nicole and hears the landlord screaming at Helene. She is behind in her rent and her landlord is a real fucking asshole. I was hoping that Van Damme would fuck that mother fucker up, but it didn’t happen. What a bummer.
Realizing that they need money, Lyon elects to go into the fighting circuit to turn some money. He fights a guy in a swimming pool and they are both wearing black spandex as they fight. I wonder if it was a stipulation going into the match. Sometimes there are uniform requirements when partaking in a sport, but why would they enforce spandex in an illegal fight and why are they fighting in a swimming pool. Of course Lyon wins again.
After beating the spandex guy, Lyon fights a guy in a kilt because he is Scottish. It was a tough fight, but Lyon wins again, but these opponents are pretty generic. I think that Van Damme must have been playing a lot of Street Fighter and Streets of Rage going into this one, but it’s still good.
Attila (Abdel Qissi) is a monster that has been kicking ass on the street-fighting circuit and the match has to be made and Cynthia is setting it up with her big plans being to watch Attila kill Lyon and make a lot of money. Attila likes to take his opponents best and then finish them off. He seems impossible to hurt. Lyon agrees to the fight, not knowing much about the dude.
When I watched the fight, I began to wonder where the fuck I knew Attila from and then it hit me. He was also the bad guy in THE QUEST with Van Damme. I then learned that Tong Po was hidden in this movie as one of the French Military goons. Van Damme is a loyal guy apparently, but he had Tong Po there. Why not have Tong Po show up and Van Damme say “I thought I killed you mother fucker.” We could have had Van Damme – Tong Po II.
LIONHEART is a pretty generic action film that isn’t as good as the other Van Damme movies of the time. The bad guys just aren’t that defined. There was no build to the Attila fight and the rest of the opponents were forgettable. I give Harrison Page a lot of credit for owning his role and Van Damme was likable and good in this but it was just missing the character development that made his other films so special. I recommend this one, but it’s not one of his best.
