Admits Jean-Claude Van Damme’s character several times within the opening minutes of Wake of Death, “I’m tired.” Dude, we’ve noticed.
Van Damme’s Ben Archer is former mob muscle gone legit, now a club bouncer, loving father and devoted husband. His wife, Cynthia (Lisa King, Love N’ Dancing), is a cop who, upon discovering a boat of Asian refugees at the harbor, bring a scared young girl home for the night, as if test-driving a puppy from the pound. Unfortunately, 14-year-old Kim (Valerie Tian, 2012’s 21 Jump Street) is no ordinary refugee; she’s on the run from her father, who unfortunately is Triad crime boss Sun Quan (Simon Yam), who unfortunately slit his wife’s throat post-coitally as Kim unfortunately watched.
“I’m going to get Kim back my way,” says Quan, and boy, does he try, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake — a wake of death, one might say — including Cynthia’s. As you’d expect, that leaves Archer in reluctant but devoted charge of Kim, protecting her from own father. It’s not unlike Boaz Yakin’s Safe, the 2012 movie in which Jason Statham also protects a young Chinese girl from the Triad while also taking revenge on the goons who murdered his spouse. The difference is Safe is far smarter and better made, but it’s not like Wake of Death didn’t have a chance.
Shot in South Africa, the cheap actioner has four credited writers and went through three directors, the first being Hong Kong great Ringo Lam, reuniting with Yam after Full Contact and with Van Damme after three films, including Maximum Risk. Lam walked after a couple of weeks, so who knows which scenes are his; my guess is the film’s best: a motorcycle chase through a shopping mall, including up the escalators and jumping from level to level. A sequence as bravura as that rises above Wake’s other set pieces, which are so poorly staged and edited that the viewer is never given the chance to invest oneself. Since Philippe Martinez (The Chaos Experiment) holds the directorial credit and also produced, we can pin the failure on him.
Van Damme himself is fine. Ironically, the further time removes him from his box-office heyday, the better an actor he becomes. Every now and again, one of his DVD premieres pops with some acclaim — like 2008’s JCVD and 2012’s Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning — but not enough to fuel a career comeback. Wake of Death isn’t one of those standouts, lumbering with so many slow-motion shots and needless scenes — like watching Yam practicing tai chi for a hot minute — that the running time keeps calling attention to its own padding. —Rod Lott
