Jean-Claude Van Damme is back with ‘Black Water‘ a thriller action novel which contains a lot of cliches. The only exciting part of the film is when Lundgren is on screen because he always outshines the muscles of Brussels. Ever since 1992, when the two 80s stars fought against each other in the “Universal Soldier” Van Damme and Lundgren have been working with each other, and now they have worked together five times. A lot has changed in 26 years. When Lundgren stole the earlier part of the film played by a berserk cyborg antagonist, he also stole this one.
Lundgren is known for standing out from both films because he isn’t required to support either of these projects. Van Damme on the other hand grimaces while trying to struggle since he has to carry a banal, blase narrative on siege warfare concerning a rogue CIA agent. This agent has to battle evil mercenaries for the protection of files which has the personal and real names of the active undercover agents that the CIA has. Van Damme should stop trying to barrel along miserable attempts at being a forgettable supporting character. In turn, Lundgren will actually give something tasking to breathing life into an already deflated balloon.
Lundgren plays Marco, an exotic German spy who is encountered by Wheeler after the latter wakes up in a black site prison. On a submarine. Marco seems resigned to fate while Wheeler is angry and groggy. However, Marco also never directly responds to Wheeler’s inquiries by sighing and appearing despondent to all the absurdity that surrounds them. A man of action needs to give context, and Van Damme does so through a very prolonged flashback: the man suffered an attack by a bunch of tough guys who had blocked his way with his partner Melissa (Courtney B. Turk) at a Promethean motel. Afterward, Wheeler gets apprehended by the CIA, headed by Agent Patrick Ferris (Patrick Kilpatrick), in an industrial car park. The baddies from the hotel must be tough guys because they shoot Melissa in slow motion twice while Van Damme unintentionally groans in what is meant to be a protest but is much more laughable. Right after this main excuse for the mayhem, Wheeler stands up to Ferris’s group, who, upon reveling in their newfound superiority, decide to threaten Wheeler with torture in the form of eye gouging if he doesn’t tell them the location of the files he is concealing.
The truth about Wheeler’s true allegiances is rather baffling. Did he go off the rails? Or is he still nominally loyal to his country? That gets answered sooner rather than later since screenwriter Chad Law does not seem concerned about this issue, no matter how complex and overt it might be.
Law tends to work from scenarios that revolve around the different groups who live in the black site submarine prison never coined any names. Wheeler, alongside the aspiring CIA agent Cassie (Jasmine Waltz), team up with one another to escape but are not having any luck. In charge of the suspicious security crew is Kingsley (Aleksander Vayshelboym), with a rogue agent whose identity I won’t spoil for people who may not have watched this yet (but let’s be honest, it’s not that challenging to decipher). There’s Ferris and his band of thugs. And don’t forget the stereotypical good guy Captain Dorsey (John Posey) and his useless crew, all of whom look like they want to prevent a nuclear disaster from their submarine. Oh, and Marco’s there, too.
Weirdly, Lundgren, the most physically imposing actor of “Black Water” is nowhere to be found for much of the film’s droning 105 minutes, and yes, there is a reason for that. You might say that he’s the out-of-place submersible elephant, but he’s not really, as Marco manages to outwit and outmaneuver multiple villains. Nonetheless, Lundgren does his best with what little time he has on-screen, though that’s not saying much.
The least realistic aspect of “Black Water” is that not a single person, including any honest CIA agents (and some purported to be bad ones, too, by the film’s mid-point), utters a word about their attempt at an underwater setting for the CIA prison. This aqua-jail features complete torture and undocumented interrogations as a matter of routine. There is no one who questions that openly absurd scenario. Rather “Black Water” is concerned with the capture and then release of Wheeler, an honest man, who is presumed to have done some really bad things, but that we all trust implicitly because, uh, his lady partner was shot before his eyes? This unstoppable vengeance stock scenario simply does not compute when applied to a modern era where US officials can threaten to stab a guy in the eyeball and walk away looking comparatively innocent. If government-sanctioned torture is what you are going to exploit, then for heaven’s sake follow through. The makers of “Black Water” never do.
And then Van Damme? As Wheeler, he spends much of his time going pew-pew with automatic rifles and scowling at incredibly forgettable low-rent villains. Forget Lundgren even the once and twice-billed star of “Double Impact” is served poorly in “Black Water.”
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