Jean-Claude Van Damme stars as a foreign legionnaire whose brother gets turned into a human Molotov cocktail by some unruly customers. Van Damme goes AWOL and walks the entire length of the Sahara Desert and swims the entire length of the Atlantic Ocean in order to come to America to see him. Once in the USA, he doesn’t have a quarter to call the hospital, so he participates in an underground kickboxing competition just to earn enough change to make a phone call.
That’s the kind of devotion you just don’t see in families nowadays.
Anyway, the underground kickboxing tournaments are all ran by “The Lady”, a classy broad who wears about 8 pounds of Vidal Sassoon in her hair and dresses like a high price call girl. She christens Van Damme “Lionheart” and pretty quickly he starts mopping the floor with greasy punks left and right in order to fund his cross-country road trip to see his brother.
When he finally gets around to the hospital, it turns out that his brother is compost. Since his brother left his family with a stack of unpaid medical bills, Lionheart decides to kickbox for money in lieu of Medicare. First up, Lionheart battles a kilt wearing dude in a parking garage, then a hillbilly in a handball court, followed by a kickboxer in a nearly empty swimming pool and finally he goes against a ponytailed Samoan named Attila under a circus tent.
At 105 minutes, the film is probably about 20 minutes longer than it really needed to be (the subplot with the Foreign Legion goons trying to kidnap Van Damme should’ve been scrapped). The bloated middle section of the movie where Van Damme just kinda shuffles along aimlessly moping about the death of his brother while wearing extremely high wasted pants played a little too much like a Lifetime for Men Movie of the Week for me, but whenever JCVD was karate kicking punks, it was damn good times.
Despite it’s numerous flaws (the tender ending where Van Damme is reunited with his family after only being away from them for two whole minutes while triumphant music plays in the background is one of the cheesiest things you’ll ever see in a movie, period), Lionheart has a little something for everybody. For the guys, there is plenty of kickboxing action, a knife into the hand, lots of people getting hit square in the nuts and a record number of people being thrown through candy glass windows. For the ladies, there’s an extended sequence where Van Damme endlessly shovels coal without the benefit of a shirt. And the finale where JCVD rallies himself from a having a bloody wound under his ribcage to winning the big match makes this The Natural of kickboxing movies.
It’s no Bloodsport, but as second tier Van Damme flicks go, it’s not bad at all.
Brian (Cobra) Thompson and Lisa (Ghoulies) Pelikan co-star and future direct to video superstars Billy Blanks and Jeff Speakman also have small roles. Director Sheldon Lettich also directed JCVD in Double Impact, The Order and Hard Corps. Van Damme later wound up in the Foreign Legion in Legionnaire.
AKA: AWOL. AKA: Wrong Bet.