Navigation

Until Death (2007)

Dir: Simon Fellows

 

Anthony Stowe (Jean Claude Van Damme) is a down-and-out, heroine addicted, detective whose career has stalled, whose marriage to his wife Valerie Stowe (Selina Giles) is failing, whose colleagues dislike him and whose ex-partner Gabriel Callaghan (Stephen Rae, “Interview with the Vampire”) is now becoming the city’s leading crime lord.

Lowe staggers from one disaster to another but is till driven to get Callaghan despite his personal traumas and is causing the gangster some major headaches.
An impatient Callaghan puts out a hit on Stowe who, after a valiant fight, takes a bullet to the head that puts him into a 6 month coma.
While on the slow road to recovery, as Callaghan continues his brutal rise to power, Stowe finds himself not only fighting to recover his health and dignity and fighting to save his mortally wounded marriage, but also fighting for his life as Callaghan makes his move….

After the career boost (at least critically and with die-hard fans) of the excellent “Wake of Death” Van Damme slipped once more into straight to video movie indifference.
Hopefully though “Until Death” will be another boost that will keep his career on the rise this time as it’s certainly the best thing Jean Claude Van Damme has done since the aforementioned "Wake of Death" and has a truly superb first half.

Van Damme is a long way from his other roles here (a million miles away from his heyday hero roles, that's for sure) and the film never, ever, tries to play down (or water down) the characters’ problems and weaknesses or shy away from showing the level Stowe has sunk to.
This is a Van Damme that not only looks pale, sweaty, hung over, sallow and a general human car wreck but also a Van Damme that is willing (as he certainly matures as an actor) to be shown scoring drugs in dirty alleyways and injecting heroin (resulting in a really freaky hallucination sequence) in his filthy car on some even filthier waste ground.
This is a Van Damme shown staggering from fix to fix, being brutish and unrepentant in his illegality and self-loathing anger, only taking time off to brutally screw an unfortunate hooker he has blackmailed into giving him a freebie over a backroom bar pool table. This is a long way from the clean-cut, ego stroking Van Damme from the likes of “Bloodsport”.

And he handles his character’s degradation extremely well. Van Damme really goes all out here and does a genuinely fine job.

This portion of the film also features some excellent set-pieces (some good scenes with his fellow cops and a very tense, gun-point interrogation of a bad guy) and a wonderfully exciting cafe shootout that delivers the thudding, bloody, violence we expect from our modern thrillers.
In fact this is surprisingly bloody and graphic all round and compliments the darkness and extremity that shrouds the first half of the film perfectly.
Not much hand-to-hand fighting is seen in "Until Death" but Van Damme handles the well staged shootouts extremely well and knows how to handle a gun in a way that oozes calculated coolness better than most Hollywood actors.

It's later on that things start to go a bit amiss.
It's to the film's credit that we are shown that the road to Stowe’s recovery is a tough and hard one, but this also slows the driving narrative of the first half down rather too much and leaves Stowe with nothing much to actually do at all.
It has to be said as well that his waking up to what he was to be a better man is slightly sickly sweet and seems to be more to bring the ‘old’ Van Damme persona back.
His relationship with his Wife though is well done and realistically complex and contradictory.

The newspaper headlines we see in this portion of the movie, about Callahan's rise to power and his brutal crime spree, also smack more of a comic strip Gangster flick (exchange 'Capone' for 'Callaghan' and spin the newspapers around and you hopefully see what I mean)and as such take away from the gritty realism we saw so much of in the first half of the film.

This recovery period also opens up a rather confused and messy plot hole.
Slight spoilers here.
Why does Callaghan make a half hearted try to kill Stowe while he's recovering in bed but then never try again (even when Stowe is casually walking around alone outside his house making himself a very easy target indeed)?
If Callaghan had not tried to kill Stowe again, because he was deemed no longer a threat due to his condition, then we would have no real problems.
But having an attempt on his life simply brings up the question why, if it was so important to kill him, did they simply not try again?
The screenplay needed to make it's mind up.

The way that the screenplay gets Stowe and Callaghan to meet up for the finale is also rather contrived (Rea is also badly overacting here, which hurts the scene) and suffers from giving Callaghan a pulled out of nowhere obsession for this meeting to even exist.
And we also have that old James Bond problem of why don't they just kill him while they have the chance without all this complicated set-up?

But the final shoot-out is well done (though not as good as the café sequence) and has a couple of nice twists and Stowe is still shown to be a delightfully merciless SOB as well.
Unarmed with hands up in the air? Stowe will still put a bullet through your head.
Running away? Stowe doesn't care , he'll just put three bullets into your back.

The finale is a bit abrupt but is faithful to the character we saw so well developed in the first half of the movie and it's certainly a movie that is far darker and grittier than perhaps any other Van Damme film and although the second half partly falls apart thanks to a screenplay that ties itself in knots and some bad acting by Stephen Rea, (and now and again by Selina Giles) we ultimately have a film that shows (along with "From Hell" and the aforementioned must-see "Wake of Death") that Van Damme still has a lot to offer, has matured nicely in moving away from his more showy martial arts roles as age moves in (take note Steven Seagal!!) and is by far the most hopeful 'old time' action star still making films.