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| Images courtesy of MVD Entertainment Group |
Years before penning the Blade trilogy, Christopher
Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy and several of the Call of Duty games
as well as directing Blade: Trinity, Ann Arbor Michigan based screenwriter
and comic book author David S. Goyer first broke into the industry as a
screenwriter for the 1990 Deran Sarafian directed Jean-Claude Van Damme prison
break action thriller Death Warrant.
Being rereleased on 4K disc per the MVD Rewind Collection and their CED
videodisc flavored 4K LaserVision Collection moniker, it was one of two films featuring
the lead actor in the same year alongside Lionheart which also is coming
to 4K via MVD.
Something of a continuation of John Flynn’s Lock Up with
Sylvester Stallone involving a corrupt warden and equally nefarious guard dogs,
its a prison movie that drops the undercover cop hero in the middle of a
labyrinthine meat grinder he must fight tooth and nail to make his way out
of. Though reviews were initially mixed,
the low-budget nearly straight-to-video feature budgeted at $6 million did
somewhere around $46 million and further cemented Van Damme as a 90s box office
draw posited alongside Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Sylvester Stallone and most
notably Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Detective Louis Burke (JCVD), following the execution of his
partner’s killer known as the Sandman (Patrick Kilpatrick), picks up a secret
mission to pose undercover as a prisoner inside the Harrison State Prison to
investigate a series of murders culminating in the deaths of one officer and
eight inmates. Booked with a phony armed
robbery conviction and aided by fellow officer Amanda (Cynthia Gibb) posing on
the outside as his wife, he crosses paths with the corrupt and conniving warden
Sergeant De Graff (Art LaFleur) as well as forming a rapport with black
prisoners Priest (Abdul Salaam El-Razzac) and Hawkins (Robert Guillaume) to uncover
an illicit organ trade operation. The
trouble is it goes all the way up to the highest levels of police bureaucracy
who are fixing to do away with Burke before he uncovers more with an unlikely
secret weapon.
An action-survival thriller originally entitled Dusted that
kinda stretches the boundaries of realism and plausibility in favor of a
machismo male oriented fantasy vision full of brawn and a surprising amount of
racial tension that resolves itself in unexpected ways, JCVD’s second film of
1990 lensed in 1.85:1 by James Cameron cinematographer Russell Carpenter and
scored with synthesized abandon by Gary Chang is a mostly entertaining
yarn. Playing largely on the
larger-than-life mythos of the character of the Sandman in a setup that feels a
bit like a precursor to Goyer’s own interpretation of the character Bane in The
Dark Knight Rises, it is a buildup and payoff well worth sitting around
for.
JCVD is good though the real anchor and moral compass of
this saga is acted by Robert Guillaume as an aged Black prisoner whose eyesight
is fading but can still see a good soul in need of his help. The eventual voice of Rafiki in The Lion
King, the film comes to warm up to and soon lean on him. David Lynch fans will spot George Dickerson from
Blue Velvet as the attorney general who may know more about the prison
murders than he leads on. The show stealer
without a doubt is Patrick Kilpatrick who might be the scariest adversary JCVD
has yet face or will face.
Produced and released by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer in September,
the brisk 89-minute running actioner was met with mixed reviews but
nevertheless turned a profit against the tight budget. Moreover it served as a kind of dress
rehearsal for what screenwriter David S. Goyer would or wouldn’t venture
towards in his future career prospects involving a character who is buried in
death clawing his way out ala The Dark Knight Rises.
MVD Rewind Collection’s 4K edition made from
a 16-bit scan of the original camera negative with uncompressed LPCM 2.0 stereo
sound is a splendid two-disc UHD/BD combo package featuring a director
commentary, new interviews with Patrick Kilpatrick, Art LaFleur and Cynthia
Gibb. As always they have included
reversible sleeve art, a mini poster and a collectible faux-worn slipcover
designed to look like a SelectaVision Videodisc. Sure it is dumb and cartoonish but I had a
good old-fashioned time with it and the MVD UHD looks and sounds great.
--Andrew Kotwicki
