Bloodsport kind of has an identity crisis. It’s not so bad it’s good (cheesy montages and poor dubbing notwithstanding), but it’s almost good enough to be… well, good. It wasn’t Jean Claude Van Damme’s first movie, but it’s probably the one which put him on the map. Van Damme plays a U.S. Army Captain who goes AWOL to participate in the underground kumite (“koo-muh-tay”), a tournament in which thirty martial artists gather in Hong Kong to face off until there’s only one left. One character describes it as “cockfighting with humans.”
Along the way, he meets Donald Gibb (Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds) who provides so-so comic relief until the film’s villain smashes his skull in. At that point, the stakes have been raised and Van Damme’s character not only has to fight for his own honor, but for… oh, who cares? If you haven’t seen Bloodsport, all you want to know is: Is the fighting any good? Sort of. Sometimes Van Damme’s moves are so plodding, I wonder why the director employs slow motion at all.
There’s a curious lack of blood for a movie that has “Blood” right there in its title. Still, the film’s extremely watchable, I guess because it’s so rarely boring. Cannon was good at making cheap movies look expensive. Consider the fact this was made for around four million dollars, adjusted for inflation, and a modern studio wouldn’t get this kind of production value for anything less than fifty million or so.
The character Van Damme plays in Bloodsport was a real guy who was full of shit when he convinced the filmmakers to tell his story. That doesn’t matter at all.
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