Van Damme portrays former New Orleans cop Jack Robideaux, who joins the United States Southern Border Patrol and finds himself facing off with drug smugglers, led by Stephen Lord's Benjamin Meyers, with Adkins playing his enforcer Karp. While not anything Earth-shattering, it still kicked off the concept of Adkins-Van Damme double-headers.
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Scott Adkins' third movie with straight-to-DVD action maven Isaac Florentine was Van Damme's first, and to date only, collaboration with Florentine. Assassination Games likely won't top anyone's list of Scott Adkins and Jean-Claude Van Damme team-ups, but they still showed in their committed portrayals of Flint and Brazil they had a passing-of-the-torch chemistry. Still, Scott Adkins and Jean-Claude Van Damme stretch their legs as rivals turned allies and clearly begin to settle into a groove of being an action movie duo. With a handful of action scenes, including a confrontation between Brazil and Flint that's over in a flash, and a generally slow pace, Assassination Games isn't to the Adkins-Van Damme library what 2007's War was for Jet Li and Jason Statham's collaborations. It must be stated upfront that one's expectations must be properly calibrated for Assassination Games as more of a cat-and-mouse game than a team-up of two kicking machines. Made under the working title of Weapon, the retitling to Assassination Games is fitting, as the movie is more of an underworld crime thriller than an action thriller. By this point in his career, Van Damme had reinvented himself as grizzled Clint Eastwood type, while Adkins was still in his very early days of mainstream recognition, so pairing them in an assassin movie as two generations of contract killers in a somewhat meta-commentary on their respective careers made sense. Brazil finds an unlikely frenemy in Scott Adkins' Roland Flint, a former assassin who comes out of retirement to take up the contract on Yakur, who left Flint's wife Anna (played by Van Damme's daughter, Bianca Bree) in a coma. Van Damme plays assassin Vincent Brazil, who takes up a contract for the life of crime boss Polo Yakur, played by Ivan Kaye. The second Adkins-Van Damme movie marked their first real team up in 2011's Assassination Games. Here are Scott Adkins and Jean-Claude Van Damme's movies ranked, from worst to best. Their later work together, in particular, would prove to be some of the best in both of their filmographies, especially the most recent two. Since Adkins' star has risen, he and Van Damme have collaborated on four movies to date, which alternately cast them as enemies, allies, or enemies-turned-allies.
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RELATED: Undisputed: The Martial Arts Movie Series Ranked Worst To Best Adkins also currently hosts the YouTube series The Art of Action, featuring interviews with many of his contemporaries in action films like Michael Jai White, Tony Jaa, Alain Moussi, and Iko Uwais.
Growing up a fan of Van Damme, the British-born martial artist would essentially become his idol's successor with hits like the Undisputed series and the Ninja films, along with villainous turns in movies like Wolf Warrior, Doctor Strange, and Ip Man 4: The Finale.
Though his career waned toward the end of the '90s, Van Damme re-emerged in the 2000s as a weathered action movie veteran, winning acclaim for the semi auto-biographical JCVD in 2008 and transitioning into a mentor role in the rebooted Kickboxer franchise.Īround that time, there was a new kid on the block making a name for himself: Scott Adkins. How do Scott Adkins and Jean-Claude Van Damme's collaborations rank, worst to best? In the late '80s and much of the '90s, Van Damme was a household name who was affectionately nicknamed "The Muscles from Brussels." With his jaw-dropping flexibility and balletic talent in martial arts, Van Damme headlined such action hits as Bloodsport, Kickboxer, Hard Target, and Timecop.