Greatest out of work actor of the day: Jean-Claude Van Damme

What happened Jean-Claude? Why did all of the great 80’s action stars go the way of the direct to dvd releases?

Lets take a look back at the “classics”:

‘Bloodsport‘, ‘Kickboxer‘, ‘Lion Heart‘, ‘Death Warrent‘, and ‘Universal Soldier‘. ‘No Where to run‘ was pretty good, but the first 5 are Jean Claude 80’s gold.

‘Bloodsport‘ really got him into the mainstream action movie spotlight, playing Frank Dux based on a true story about underground fighting.   He did two lesser known movies between this and ‘Kickboxer’. One called ‘Black Eagle’, and one called ‘Cyborg’ which has a plot outline of ” A martial artist hunts a killer in a plague-infested urban dump of the future”.

‘Kickboxer‘ pit him as Kurt Sloane who is a cornerman for his brother, Champion fighter Eric Sloane. He watches his brother get paralyzed by Tong Po, and he sets out to avenge his brothers injury. There were about 895 sequels to this movie, but none of them starred Jean Claude.

‘Lionheart‘ was the follow up to ‘Kickboxer’ and really solidified his role as an “Action Hero”. Van Damme starred as Lyon Gaultier who deserted the Foreign Legion and came to the US to again avenge something that happened to his brother, who left a wife and daughter in the US. He takes to underground fighting, but this time his life is put on the line everytime he takes a fight.

As you can see there is a trend here with the movies..all about fighting, and all usually about avenging something.

Van Damme isnt absent in the movie world, but the movie he is doing arent very good. All directly to DVD, and usually arent even very good renters. Hopefully he made enough money in the 80’s to survive all this. Good Luck J.C.V.D.