A Film Canon

Less an integrated film than a sustained gesture of fandom, Bloodsport is amateur in the most generous way, an overwhelmingly affectionate tribute to classical martial arts cinema. Assuming a loving credulity on the part of its audience - a credulity strong enough to bury both World War II and the whole legacy of French Indochina in a mythic wash of warm synth, a series of transformative montage-sequences - Newt Arnold and Jean Claude Van Damme craft a self-consciously 'awesome' vision of legendary Nunjitsu fighter Frank W Dux, who travels to Hong Kong for the annual Kumite - a no-holds-barred martial arts competition. Like a John Carpenter comedy minus the self-conscious pat-on-the-back to the audience, Arnold paints an incredibly evocative portrait of the Kumite venue, imbuing it with a mildly futuristic, sci-fi quality, that not only draws out the robotic choreography of the fighting, but suffuses the surrounding "corridors" with the atmospheric claustrophobia of the Mortal Kombat franchise, or the WWF universe. It's part of a more general depiction of Hong Kong, and especially Kowloon, that seems as indebted to William Gibson as to Carpenter - a mildly dystopian series of neon catacombs, "a run-down piece of no-man's-land in the middle of paradise". But the aesthetic and narrative kernel of the film is undoubtedly Van Damme's body and fighting style, which immediately juxtaposes robotic with gymnastic literacy, reflecting his training in ballet. If Stallone's musculature is transcendent, then Van Damme's is immanent - a kind of cerebral, spiritualised presence that only seems to make contact with the world - and then fleetingly - through his feet. As a result, most of the spectacular action sequences are leg-based - or, at least, it's leg action that tends to make them truly bloodsport - conflating the feet with the hands and, in the climactic battle, with the eyes. Dexterity and agility become more of an asset than brute strength - the ability to tiptoe over a tightrope of sampans in Hong Kong harbour - and find their logical conclusion in Van Damme's spectacular and signature leg splits. Culminating the strange effeminacy that makes it more likely that his naked buttocks would appear in an action film than those of any of his muscular peers, these condense the film's spectacle into an unusual, decentered virility - the ability to indefinitely stretch the groin, rather than use it - a virility that proves most useful in the penultimate and most memorable fight sequence, in which Dux's fist and his opponent's testes make epic contact.