REVIEW: Kill ‘Em All (2017)

This is one of the worst movies I’ve seen in years.  Maybe one of the top five worst I’ve ever seen and God knows, I’ve watched some trash.  It’s Jean Claude Van Damme’s worst movie ever, as far as I can remember right now anyway — most of his stuff this side of the 1990’s has been pretty bad to various degrees.  It’s a thoroughly depressing stretch of awful.

In this one, the latest DTV from Van Damme, An unidentified man arrives at a local hospital, seriously wounded. He is taken care of by a devoted nurse, Suzanne. Things take a turn for the worse when an international gang shamelessly invades the hospital to kill him.  Van Damme is the unidentified man and Autumn Reeser is the nurse called by by detective Peter Stormare to explain her connections to Van Damme and the posse of killers who pursued him.

This is one of the worst types of DTV; the one that wants to be a sophisticated, intricate thriller.  So this means that the ‘story’ is told through a series of flashbacks, flash forwards and double flashbacks.  The viewer is basically subjected to a convoluted mess that would be terrible if it was told straight, but even less engaging when it’s thrown onto the screen at random.  Accompanying this are the usual DTV offenses.

The editing is bizarre, like it was finished by glitched software.  And the camerawork sways, swings, jerks and weaves, making you want to throw in the towel; and this isn’t just for action scenes, during some basic conversations the camera is spazzing out in an attempt to ‘Bourne’ the atmosphere.  Also present are what I call piss filters, i.e. certain parts of the movie have a cheap, nasty golden/green tint in an attempt to make things look edgy.  Instead it looks like someone pissed on the film reel.  Maybe it was Van Damme…

… because the guy looks depressed as fuck in an already sour movie and seems to have contempt for the whole affair.  Man, what happened to this guy?  He’s phoning it in in every way imaginable.  Is he in the movie much?  A fair bit, and the best part (such as it is) is an ineptly filmed fight scene with his son, Kris.  He has three fight scenes in total, with a fourth filmed entirely with a double.

Bottom line, this movie is so miserable that watching could actually ruin your entire week.  Avoid!