DARKNESS OF MAN Review: JCVD Tackles Gangland Crime, Revenge And Redemption In Sluggish Neo-Noir Thriller
Darkness Of Man arrives on Digital from Sony Pictures on May 21.
5 min. read
There aren’t a lot of Jean-Claude Van Damme-led titles I can point to in the last decade or so as a favorite. Enemies Closer comes to mind with The Bouncer definitely hitting a few highs for me. I tried pretty hard with 2021’s The Last Mercenary and pretty much tuned out each time I hit play.
It’s a really weird place to be in as a fan of the venerable star of heyday American action cinema. My appreciation for the actor notwithstanding though, I can’t blame anyone for feeling conflicted nowadays about his movies, or any of the like from similar stars. Suffice it to say, Darkness Of Man puts my head precisely in that sort of space.
I love a good, solid noir thriller. Van Damme and director James Cullen Bressack definitely touch on that energy from start to finish, between the performances, set pieces and atmosphere, to the cinematography in certain areas. Moreover, it’s Van Damme who solidly carries the film as he should – when he can.
Unfortunately, this gets undermined at times by some of the acting, the slow pacing and generally drab tone most of the way, and it’s not really until the first major action scene well within the first hour that things start to pick up. That’s when the story kicks in, and again, this kind of uncertainty shouldn’t be with a story that sounds like it ought to deliver more than it does.
How so? Well, it’s a story of revenge and redemption. It starts in Miami with a job gone wrong, leading to a dead witness. Russell Hatch (Van Damme) is a downtrodden ex-interpol agent burdened with keeping his promise to protect Jayden (Emerson Min), the son of a witness (Chika Kanamoto) murdered following that fateful night, an incident which then shuttles things two years later in Los Angeles after the opening credits.
Hatch is living and loving with the beautiful Claire (Kristanna Loken) in a Los Angeles motel. When he’s not hittin’ the sack or trying to numb the pain with a certain renewed habit, he’s on the road driving Jayden to-and-from school – that is, when Jayden is actually at school. The only one on hand to care for Jayden is his grandfather, Kim (Lee Ji-yong) who owns a small convenience store.
The movie is keen to spotlight the presence of clashing rivals between the Korean and Russian mobs, the latter which Hatch just happens to have a bone to pick with. Little does he know, however, that Kim’s own crime boss son, Dae Hyun (Peter Jae) wants nothing more than to groom Jayden and bring him into the family business, something Hatch plans on stopping at any cost in order to honor Jayden’s mother’s wish.
The real catch a while comes after Hatch and Dae Hyun come to terms, and events unfold that eventually force Jayden to confront his wrongdoing. Even that effort goes South at one point, resulting in a desperate search for the young man when he suspects the Russian cartel’s had him kidnapped.
At about 110 minutes of runtime, Darkness Of Man really only picks up in the second half, finally leaning into its plot. There’s several action and fight scene moments, the best of which finds Hatch taking on two of Dae Hyun’s soldiers as Jayden waits in a car out of harm’s way. The camera pans carefully to capture the fisticuffs and passing moments, letting the scene breathe a little, and performing optimally.
The rest of the action delivers farily well, in addition to bringing in some noteworthy supporting character efforts like Spencer Breslin’s Chris, Hatch’s motel neighbor. He’s a slacker and drug dealer whose limited charisma only makes him as tenable as his usefulness when the time comes, and the writing here doesn’t bite much with the film’s presiding mood.
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To that end, I can’t say the same when it comes to Jayden. There’s an understanding that comes with seeing young teen characters take on situations that deal with unanswered trauma and pain. Here, however, the one scene in which it should count feels more contrived without any real sense of coherency. There’s a struggle here in Darkness Of Man that Bressack tries to mitigate between laying the groundwork for the environment in which the story is told, and fleshing out the kind of resonance Hatch and Jayden are supposed to establish by the end. It gets there, but its progression is a bumpy one.
Par for the course of the sort of rutted storytelling is the rando intro the smaller roles played by known MMA celeb Nick Diaz, and Van Damme’s son, Kristopher Van Varenberg. Their fight scene is supposed to be somewhat cruicial to the story but it feels more throwaway than not. There’s also another cameo that genre fans will take a liking to, and which I won’t mention here.
Beyond these points, I would say Darkness Of Man measures about as well as Bressack’s Beyond The Law did. Hot Seat offered a little something more, but the prospective direct-to-digital action filmmaker has a ways to go. The good news is, unlike a certain pair of remakes that also starred Van Damme in recent memory, Darkness Of Man illuminates with a palatable crime noir to whet the appetite depending on how yours is.
Native New Yorker. Been writing for a long time now, and I enjoy what I do. Be nice to me!