Friday, February 19, 2010

Je Ne Sais Pas, Van Damme.

Last night I was watching this video of Dolph Lundgren. Have you seen it? It’s amazing.



Unfamiliar with Dolph’s work? Allow me to freshen your memory. He played He Man in Masters of the Universe.



For those of you who think he looks kind of gay as He Man, let’s look at some of the other people that have dressed up as He Man.





By comparison I’d say Dolph looks pretty bad ass.

He also played Andrew Scott in Universal Soldier.



That’s right. Alongside none other than splits performing, super bad ass Jean Claude Van Damme.



This got me thinking about Van Damme and some of his films. Why is it that in many of the movies Van Damme made they felt they had to explain his Belgian accent?

For example in Lionheart he played a deserter of the French Foreign Legion. If you thought Dolph Lundgren looked gay as He Man, check this out.




I think they also filmed Gerardo’s Rico Suave at the same location.



In Death Warrant Van Damme plays a (French) Canadian policeman that goes under cover in a prison. It’s kind of like Shawshank Redemption but with all the intelligent and uplifting parts replaced by kicking.


I’ve seen that guy with the fu Manchu get his ass kicked in at least 10 different movies.

Hard Target has Jean Claude taking on the roll of a New Orleans drifter (from the French quarter) who, while trying to help a woman find out what happened to her father, stumbles on a group of bad guys that hunt hobos for sport. This may be the most complicated Van Damme plot yet.


Man, did you cheer while watching that? I did.

You see what I mean about how they keep explaining his accent? What does it matter? Does anyone watching these movies care? And why didn’t they ever do it with Arnold Schwarzenegger? His accent is even crazier. James Cameron never felt the need to explain to us why our robot enemies of the future decided to give their time traveling cybernetic killing machine a thick Austrian accent. In fact the closest anyone came to making any sort of statement regarding Arnie’s language barrier was the makers of Hercules In New York. In the original release they just gave up and dubbed his voice completely. I wonder why?



Maybe producers thought Americans couldn’t accept the concept of one of their heroes having a French sounding accent.



Maybe if they had ignored it and cast Van Damme as an American in all his films he’d be a governor now too. Maybe I need to stop thinking about bad movies for a while.

Oh well. At least you got to watch some awesome videos with me. Have a good weekend yall.

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