The Bloody, Gloriously Lurid 1995 Action Drama Sudden Death is Ridiculous and Ridiculously Fun
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Yesterday was a huge day for me, Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place and Declan Haven Books because yesterday I officially launched the Kickstarter campaign for my ninth book, The Fractured Mirror: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s Definitive Guide to American Movies About the Film Industry.
The danger with a big launch like that is that I’ll be so obsessed with compulsively seeing how the campaign is doing that I’ll be unable to work, that my anxiety and excitement will render me useless.
So I figured I would distract myself with something light and fun, quintessential popcorn escapist fare that would entertain and amuse me without making undue demands on my psyche or intellect.
I found the perfect distraction in the 1995 Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Sudden Death, which reunites the insanely agile, impossibly pretty martial artist with Timecop director Peter Hyams.
Sudden Death has been on my endless mental list of movies to get around to seeing for years now. I’m glad I finally pulled the trigger because Hyams’ lurid NHL drama was exactly what I needed.
And, as an additional pointless bonus, it’s the third sports movie I accidentally saw in a row. First I saw the maximalist 1999 football melodrama Any Given Sunday for a Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 side-quest covering the complete filmography of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.
Then I watched the delightful retro baseball comedy-drama Long Gone for my series on all of Virginia Madsen’s films and now I am following it up with an affectionate look back at a uniquely satisfying b-movie that’s essentially “Die Hard at the 7th game of the Stanley Cup with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Powers Boothe” in the Willis and Rickman roles.
I was a huge Chicago sports fan when Sudden Death was released so I got a minor thrill from the Chicago Blackhawks being one of the two teams in the big game but my mind was not blown the way it would have been if the movie took place during a White Sox game, a Bulls game, a Bears game or even a Cubs game.
I am an American, after all, which means that I hate hockey with a white hot fury and consider it less a legitimate “sport” than an unforgivable assault on all our country holds dear.
It’s not my cup of tea but I’m not sure I would have been able to have handle it if Sudden Death featured cameos from personal heroes like Frank Thomas or Robin Ventura in addition to all of the meat and potato bloodshed an action movie buff could want.
Sudden Death opens with a prologue involving Darren McCord (Van Damme), a French-Canadian firefighter in Pittsburgh who fails to save a little girl caught in a deadly fire.
We then cut to two years later. Darren is no longer a firefighter. Instead he’s a fire engineer at Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena. That seems like a perfectly respectable job to me, someone who respects and appreciates the working class, but people nevertheless treat him as if he was a janitor whose job is to clean toilets using only his hands and mouth.
Yes, people treat the traumatized hero like he’s a flaming pile of human garbage because he wasn’t able to save everyone he encountered as a firefighter. This is particularly true of his jackass son Tyler (Ross Malinger), who never misses an opportunity to remind his dad that he used to have a job that commanded respect but now he’s now he’s a pathetic laughingstock whose life has no value or meaning.
Darren’s job allows him to do things like take Tyler and her sister Emily (Whittni Wright) to the all-important seventh game of the Stanley Cup but that perk doesn’t make his son see him as any less of a loser.
It’s up to Darren to prove to his son, and himself, that he’s not the shittiest excuse for a father in human history by defeating a team of mercenaries, saving the stadium AND, for good measure, making what we are informed is the single greatest save in hockey history when he sneaks onto the ice and briefly plays goalie.
Darren’s bloody road to redemption begins with Secret Service agent gone bad Joshua Foss (Boothe) callously corrupting the sacred, sanctioned, orderly violence of professional hockey with violence of an unsanctioned, disorderly variety.
The sneering villain with the sonorous Southern drawl sweeps into the stadium like he owns the place with a phalanx of heavily armed henchman and takes Vice-President Daniel Binder (distinguished character actor Raymond J. Barry, whose career includes playing Dewey Cox’s iconically disapproving dad) hostage.
Van Damme is in fine form throughout but as in Hard Target and Timecop, he’s upstaged at every turn by the heavyweight character actor playing the bad guy.
You would think Boothe was Patrick Swayze or Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing because he is clearly having the time of his life playing a man whose outsized villainy and crazed charisma are arena-sized and then some.
Sudden Death has the shameless brutality and liberating vulgarity of top-tier Cannon trash. In a sequence that inexplicably is not heralded as one of the greatest action set-pieces of all time, the sole female member of the terrorist crew hides inside the costume of Iceburgh, the Penguins’ actual mascot.
Darren, our hero, kills poor Iceburgh despite the woman inside the suit flipping around like an Olympics-level gymnast or Parkour enthusiast despite her bulky and cumbersome costume.
Nowadays professional sports teams look askance at entertainment that depicts their world in a less than glowing way. Yet the NHL inexplicably signed on to be at the center of a super-lurid, hyper-violent b-movie where children are terrorized throughout and an NHL mascot is brutally murdered by the hero.
The scene where Van Damme does some serious damage to the woman in the Iceburgh costume is notable for its audacity but it’s also a tightly choreographed and thrillingly filmed scene in its own right.
Director Hyams, who also served as cinematographer, makes Sudden Death dark in every way. It’s brutal and unflinching in its casual violence but it’s dark visually as well.
In the third act the film finally leaves its comfort zone of shadows and inky blackness. In an unexpectedly comic development, Darren briefly plays goalie in a scene that suggests an only slightly more straight-faced version of the famous set-piece in Naked Gun where Frank Drebin gets way too into impersonating an umpire.
Boothe gets the most out of every one-liner and sinister wisecrack, whether he’s asking the hero’s daughter, “Would you like it if I filled your little mouth with spiders?” or quipping of his plans to steal hundreds of millions at the behest of some very bad people, “I only wanted enough to pay off my American Express.”
Sudden Death probably does not need to be 110 minutes long but I had a goddamn blast all the same.
So thank you, ridiculous movie, for doing exactly what you promised to do. You kept me immersed in a bloody and ridiculous world at a time when I desperately needed that, for which I will always be grateful.
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