By Tony Frame. Contains spoilers.

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There’s a number of things that makes A.W.O.L one of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s best films. When I first watched it (back in 1991) I expected it to be a simple tale of revenge. For it to go down that familiar B-Movie route that had been done to death by pretty much every straight-to-video action film that was released in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The reason for that assumption was that A.W.O.L (aka Wrong Bet, Lionheart) opens with Van Damme’s brother being set on fire by drug dealers, followed by a scene in the hospital where he is so badly burnt on a gurney (proper horror show at that too, like we’ve just witnessed the birth of Freddy Krueger) that it ends with him calling out for his sibling that it practically telegraphs what the whole plot of this movie will be.

Cut to our protagonist, Lyon Gaultier (Van Damme), in Africa, serving in the middle of the desert with the Foreign Legion, who gets word of his brother’s attack. And after some punchy discourse with his military superiors (who refuse his request to visit his brother) The Muscles from Brussels subsequently makes his daring escape which allows for him to display some of his trademark fancy kicks with their bone-breaking efficiency and therefore gives the viewers some of that Van-Dammage action that they were waiting for, ever since they pressed play on the VCR. It’s a very dramatic opening amidst the stormy plains of the Sahara, and it’s aided with a brilliant orchestral score, courtesy of John Scott.

When Legionairre Lyon gets to America he is informed of his brother’s passing, and it was at this moment that I expected the plot would go down the Charlie Bronson Death Wish route and we’d watch as Van Damme tracked down and executed every last one of his bro’s assailants. But that wasn’t to be, and instead the film takes an interesting step sideways whereby the Lion (renamed by his streetwise partner and manager of sorts, Joshua, played by Harrison Page) participates in organised underground street fights, in order to make money for his brother’s wife and young daughter. Interestingly enough, Van Damme and Sheldon Lettich (the director) took a lot of inspiration for their screenplay from Walter Hill’s 1975 movie Hard Times which has the aforementioned Charles Bronson playing a bare-knuckle street boxer who befriends a loquacious hustler (James Coburn).

So, with the story of revenge avoided, what we get instead is Van Damme competing as a street fighter (four years before playing the lead in the dismal Street Fighter), in some interesting locations, against a number of different opponents and fighting styles (a fight in a large warehouse where cars form a ring with Jean-Claude battling it out against a kilted Scotsman is one of my favourite moments), making money for his sister-in-law and niece (who think the cheques they are receiving is for life insurance), all the while there’s the duplicitous relationship with his business partners who are arranging his fights (led by Deborah Rennard as the enigmatic Cynthia) which is peppered with a tempestuous layer as the Lion spurns her advances throughout the movie and adds some TV melodrama to the plot. And if that wasn’t enough to keep you appeased, well, you’re forgetting that Van Damme is on the run from the Foreign Legion, so cue the two legionnaires that are on his trail to recapture him and take him back for a court martial. With all that going on, and the brilliantly-shot and choreographed final fight against the undefeated monster of an opponent (aptly called Atilla)–as well as a tearjerker of an ending (I know some of you cried!)–it’s no wonder that this serves as one of the Van-Damme top picks from his filmography, and is up there with his other classics like Bloodsport, Kickboxer and Double Impact.

Yes, it has its cliches, but the real locations (the backstreets of New York, downtown LA and The Sunset Tower Hotel) add to the grittiness and the opulence, whilst the cast (Brian Thompson giving solid support, Harrison Page potentially stealing the show) elevate this from being the typical fare of martial arts movies that flooded the video market in the (previously mentioned) last two decades of the 20th century. Most of those movies were badly dubbed and had some ropey directing (they crossed the line, had shoddy blocking) and were either cast with trained fighters who had never acted before, or, if they had the sense to use professional actors, they ruined it by putting them in fight scenes which were either badly choreographed or only showed up the actors’ shortcomings as fighters. And not one of those films had a subliminal score like John Scott’s or the inclusion of a goosebump song like Bill Wray’s No Mercy.

All images courtesy of IMDB

Ps…this trailer makes the film look crapper (and more cliché) than it is, but it’s the only decent one I could find!