FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Lachlan Coulson This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Leofwine_draca A pretty much average thriller, like a lot of the supposed exciting rubbish which was churned out in the '80s. This one has some nice foreign locations to look at, but the muddled plot is both boring and headache inducing, involving a James Bond-like agent who must retrieve some technical stuff from the bottom of the sea. To make things interesting, there are some chase sequences and of course the expected martial arts action, but unfortunately both turn out to be disappointing.Basically, this is because they offer up little in the way of excitement, because they're totally generic and therefore useless. The only exception is a cool rooftop chase but that's the highlight of the film. The fight scenes, when they occur, are too brief and too tame, I mean we know Kosugi is tough and can easily wipe out the bad guys, so there's no suspense and not enough action. The only fight scenes worth waiting for are the Van Damme/Kosugi fights, where the martial arts aces do their bits, and there are three of these to enjoy, with the second being the best (the first is too brief, and the third is too dimly lit).The acting is typically bland for a film like this, just guys with stony faces barking out orders. There is the obligatory love interest but even the little kids are clichéd. Kosugi is okay as the hero of the piece, but he's never as engaging as he was elsewhere. People complain about Seagal and Van Damme having no charisma, but this guy makes them look like Clark Gable in comparison. Van Damme is pretty good in a rare bad-guy role, although he is no actor he definitely shows his mettle in the fight sequences, doing the splits and high kicking endlessly. It's cool to watch. As it stands it's an average thriller with a budget not high enough to do it any justice. Barely passable.

Mikey (MikeyMo_nl) Strange movie this is. It's a typical 80's action movie trying to be a James Bond film (with Van Damme in the Jaws role) with two non-English leads (the heavy accents are all over the place) and it works on no level at all.The story is plain stupid and could probably be resolved in real life through simple diplomacy or a quick Navy Seals operation. But of course this is one-man operation and boring it is...Set against the background off Malta only one men can take on a ship full of evil Russians while entertaining his kids on vacation (and I'm not making that up). What surprises me about the man that goes by the codename of Black Eagle is how 1-dimensional his character is considering he has the most screen time and they tried to flesh him out by having his kids around. he stays bland, but then again he has no charisma at all...Then Van Damme, here having about half the amount of lines Ah-nold had in Terminator he comes off as a baddie we all like. He gets more physics to display, he gets the cool moves, he even is more fleshed out (physical and character-wise) then the good guy. At the end I was just hoping Van Damme would knock his lights out.Unless you're watching a horror film (allthough this movie is a horror to watch) you're not supposed to root for the bad guy. But I was. I'm thinking they re-shot scenes making van Damme's character more likable after the success of Bloodsport, but it messes the movie up even more....

Andrei Pavlov To my thinking this movie is an excellent action drama. Dark unfriendly atmosphere, very realistic stunts, and a tragic hero (a KGB agent operating far from home) are essential ingredients of this movie.One main character (KGB agent Andrei) is sad, cruel, and taciturn. Another one (American spy of Japanese origin Ken Tani) is attentive, cruel, and a perfect family man. There are no extremely high jumps and over-the-top gore. But there is style. Everything is to the point. These two enemies (they look like two animals destined to fight each other to death) are not talking to each other, they are not trying to bargain, they show little, if any, emotion. It's all about the system, the corrupt government and military that made these two the deadly foes.Please also pay attention to the priest character in this movie. One day he is preaching and the other one he kills people, making it with righteous expression of his phony face. He cannot properly fight being no match for the Russian agent and at the end cowardly shots the agent in the leg that results in death of the latter. Sho Kosugi's character is also not a hero: in the beginning of the film he teams up with the basmatch unit (with Bin Laden cutthroats, in other words) and kills young, supposedly very poorly trained, Soviet soldiers from the cover (what an example of unsurpassed courage!) and later on when the things during the hand-to-hand combat against the Russian man get tough, he jumps off the cliff into the water, i.e. wets his pants figuratively and literally.Van Damme's character, on the other hand, is the real bad-ass hero in this one. He never retreats. He is just like a bad-tempered killing machine. His close-ups during the fits of anger are simply brilliant (remember the one when his henchmen get cheated?). He serves his State till the last drop of his blood (unlike Ken Tani, who is not even a genuine American, who is persuaded to take part in the mission by trick, and who is thinking more about his children's safety and his own ass than about the task). He even sacrifices his own personal life (having such a beauty at hand)! Something that looks absolutely out of place in modern world.Anyhow, this movie is not for fun and pure entertainment, it is not for children either. It is a thought-provoking action film. Thoughts on the following topics can emerge: children, family values, relationship with women, loyalty, killing "for the State", etc. Besides it does not contain any stupid sex scenes, which you encounter in many other flicks of the 1980s (even "The Terminator" made this mistake).Beautiful action scenes: Jean-Claude Van Damme throwing knives on a boat and fighting with Sho Kosugi one on one without weapons. Some viewers recall the car chase scene but to me it is not a highlight. Suppose, you cannot film a very energetic car chase scene on the island of Malta.If you are accustomed to over-the-top combat on screen with flashy blows and lots of bullets in the air and cannot digest a down-to-earth action drama with scanty karate combat without wires, forget about watching this one. This movie was once on the IMDb bottom list, which speaks a lot. Probably you will be bored to death during watching if you give it a try. As to me, actually cannot name any segment of this flick that falls flat.The vote for such realistic, sad, and memorable movie from my side is a 10 out of 10. Overestimation? Maybe. But this movie works simply great on all levels - that's my view. Thank you for attention.

furiousneon I have seen every Van Damme movie there is from No Retreat, No Surrender to Derailed and this is without a doubt his worst. He is barely in it, he barely speaks and although he was able to pull off some unbelievable moves, the choreography of the fights was just awful..i make up better fights when i play around with my friends. The plot was so muddled that i didnt really get anything out of it. The main character was just bad and you didnt care for him..actually i was rooting for Van Damme the whole time and he was the bad guy. Please skip this one..this is just a flat out mistake.