Scott Adkins and Jean-Claude Van Damme have appeared in four movies together, playing both enemies and allies – we rank them from worst to best.
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. 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.
Around that time, there was a new kid on the block making a name for himself: Scott Adkins.
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. 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. 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. Their later work together, in particular, would prove to be some of the best in both of their filmographies, especially the most recent two. Here are Scott Adkins and Jean-Claude Van Damme’s movies ranked, from worst to best.
4. Assassination Games (2011)
The second Adkins-Van Damme movie marked their first real team up in 2011’s Assassination Games. Van Damme plays assassin Vincent Brazil, who takes up a contract for the life of crime boss Polo Yakur, played by Ivan Kaye. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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3. The Shepherd: Border Patrol (2008)
Border Patrol. Scott Adkins’ third movie with straight-to-DVD action maven Isaac Florentine was Van Damme’s first, and to date only, collaboration with Florentine. While not anything Earth-shattering, it still kicked off the concept of Adkins-Van Damme double-headers. 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. Isaac Florentine and Scott Adkins had both just made a significant blip on the radar with Undisputed 2: Last Man Standing the year before, and while Border Patrol doesn’t rise to the same heights, it still showed how much they could do with a fraction of the budgets of theatrical releases. Van Damme was first starting to get some mileage out of his new long-in-the-tooth
old-timer persona, and he embodies that well in Border Patrol as a man who goes out of his way to avoid bar fights but ends them swiftly when that’s not an option.
The action scenes are decent all around, and the first Scott Adkins versus Jean-Claude Van Damme matchup is the reason to pop on Border Patrol, even if it’s ostensibly considerably shorter than it was originally meant to be and ends somewhat bluntly. It also shows a nice contrast of styles, with Van Damme more grounded and direct against Adkins’ airborne flashiness. Adkins and Florentine went onto bigger and better things with the Ninja and Undisputed series, while Adkins himself attained more and more mainstream recognition in the ensuing years. The Shepherd: Border Patrol showed he and Van Damme had potential as on-screen enemies or as allies, something both knew to build upon a few years down the road.
2. The Expendables 2 (2012)
With chatter of a fourth installment of The Expendables franchise periodically emerging, The Expendables 2 remains the series’ high point. Both Adkins and Van Damme declined offers for the first movies (in Adkins’ case owing to his involvement with Undisputed 3: Redemption), but for the second go-around around, they’re on hand as the villainous arms dealers the Expendables face off with. Recruited for a mission by Bruce Willis’ mysterious CIA operative Mr. Church, the Expendables find themselves battling the sinister Jean Vilain, played by Van Damme, to prevent him from selling a cache of plutonium on the black market. The crew also wants revenge for Vilain’s murder of their newest recruit, Billy the Kid, played by Liam Hemsworth.
As Van Damme’s character name displays, The Expendables 2 is a much more self-aware outing than its predecessor. References and Easter eggs regarding the cast’s action movie backgrounds and biographies abound, from Dolph Lundgren’s chemical engineering degree to a Chuck Norris Fact appearing in the intro of his solo mercenary Booker. At one point, Arnold Schwarzengger’s Trench even comments “Who is next? Rambo?” when Norris pops up next to him.
Adkins is a bit more in the background as Vilain’s right-hand man Hector, but he still makes an impact as a bloodthirsty second-in-command, essentially using his Undisputed Boyka voice in a subtle reference to his own body of work. The Expendables 2 was also Van Damme’s first wide theatrical release in over a decade,
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following the limited theatrical run of JCVD in 2008, and he sinks his teeth in the smirking taunts of Vilain in one of his few true villain roles. Jet Li’s role as Yin Yang was far more minor (though his kitchen smackdown admittedly steals the movie’s opening sequence) leaving Adkins and Van Damme to handle the bigger martial arts fights of the movie. These include Hector’s battle with Jason Statham’s Lee Christmas beside whirring helicopter blades and Vilain’s final showdown with Sylvester Stallone’s Barney Ross. As an action star ensemble rodeo and the third pairing of Adkins and Van Damme, The Expendables 2 is a lot of fun with great action scenes and more willingness to poke fun at itself than the first.
1. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012)
The trajectory the Universal Soldier series has undergone has been at once puzzling, fascinating, and quite a ride to experience, and the fact that 2012’s Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is its crowning achievement is an all-time fluke of nature. The movie sees Adkins playing a man named John, who awakens to witness his family being murdered by former UniSol Luc Devereaux, played by Van Damme. John sets about seeking revenge, with his shattered memories gradually revealing that he hasn’t gotten the whole story. Going from Universal Soldier in 1992, two made-for-TV sequels in the ’90s, to Universal Soldier: The Return in 1999, 2010’s straight-to-DVD sequel Universal Soldier: Regeneration, which retconned everything but the original, brought the franchise
to heights it had never seen before, and somehow, director John Hyams managed to top it with Day of Reckoning. Trading the franchise’s “G.I. Joe meets Terminator” trappings for an almost arthouse horror movie vibe, Day of Reckoning is a surreal, nightmarish trip down the rabbit hole of John’s mind. The UniSols are presented as villains forming a separatist group to overthrow the U.S. government only for their real motivations to become clearer as John learns more about his laboratory origins, while Dolph Lundgren also returns as Sgt. Andrew Scott.
While paced as a slow, simmering psychological thriller, the action scenes are easily the best of the Universal Soldier franchise along
with being some of the most visceral and palpable n the respective careers of Adkins, Van Damme, and Lundgren. It’s over halfway into the movie before the first proper smackdown arrives with John and the pursuing UniSol Magnus, played by MMA fighter Andrei Arlovksi (reprising his role from Regeneration), and it’s a textbook example of holding back a payoff until just the right moment with a sporting goods store fight worthy of The Raid 2. As John’s vendetta uncovers more about where he and the UniSols fit into the story, the final act turns into a bunker battle of laboratory-enhanced soldiers, with John slashing knives with Andrew Scott and going head-to-head with Devereaux, the two constantly disarming a machete from the other to see-saw the stakes back and forth.