“Directed by John Woo” was what the DVD cover advertised. I remember seeing Blackjack (1998) in video stores as a kid and thinking that was a gag – wasn’t Woo’s last movie Face/Off a big hit? Why was his name brandishing a direct-to-video Dolph Lundgren action movie? Turns out Blackjack was a TV pilot that wasn’t picked up and released as a movie. Lundgren plays Jack Devlin, an ex-Marshal turned bodyguard-for-hire who is also a dab hand at card playing and card tricks (so much so that he can slice a man’s tie off with a card), and is also wealthy enough to have a live-in butler and assistant Thomas (the great Saul Rubinek with an eye patch and a French accent). And what do you know, Jack also has to be the foster father to the high IQ touting precocious kid, Casey, whose parents were good friends with Jack and died in a car accident. Now, watching this one Friday night last week, at the end of the opening shoot-out when Dolph Lundgren jumps off a mansion balcony with two handguns blazing as the mansion explodes behind him and he lands onto a trampoline that’s just sitting there, which bounces him off into a pool, I said out loud, “This is the greatest movie ever made.” The rest of the movie might not fulfil that statement but it comes damn close with its deep 1998 era aesthetic in the hair-cuts and outfits, the poetic Woo visual flourishes, Lundgren’s innate charisma, Canadian locations subbing in for NYC, and the wacky plot moves, specifically Lundgren’s character developing a phobia of the colour white (!) and the ways the movie engineers him to confront that therapeutically in action sequences (a fist fight in a dairy factory, for example). The main plot of this movie is Lundgren being tasked to protect a super model named Cinder (Kam Heskin) who is being stalked and targeted by a psychotic failed actor (Phillip MacKenzie). There are two superb action sequences where Woo tests the TV budget with how many guns he can fire and things can explode, and a final showdown that rivals Good Will Hunting for cathartic self-help. I had a lot of fun. Available to stream on Amazon Prime and rent on iTunes. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 