This summer, MovieJawn is counting down our 25 favorite action movies of all time! We will be posting a new entry each day! See the whole list so far here.

by Clayton Hayes, Staff Writer

Spend any time thinking about it and the continued cultural impact of Bloodsport is incredible. The film is a late-80s, low-budget martial arts feature that starred a (then) relatively unknown Belgian karate champ and cribs heavily from several (better) Bruce Lee films. It was inspired by the (now) largely discredited claims of a Canadian-American martial arts instructor and features a Hong Kong cast playing a handful of different east Asian ethnicities. Its screenplay is a mess, its characters are one-dimensional (at best), and it features so many montages that it has a montage of its montages. And yet I – and many of my fellow MovieJawn contributors – still submitted it as one of our ten favorite action movies of all time.

Is it just nostalgia? Or could there be something deeper in this very flawed but very entertaining film?

For action and martial arts film fans, the allure of Bloodsport’s setup is impossible to deny. The concept of different martial arts styles being pitted against one another is unequivocally cinematic, and the conflict between kung fu traditions was a longtime staple of Hong Kong action. It was Bruce Lee’s 1973 classic Enter the Dragon, with its martial arts tournament drawing combatants from around the world, that serves as the most obvious predecessor to Bloodsport’s kumite, and Dragon’s director, Robert Clouse, explored the space a bit further with 1980’s Battle Creek Brawl (aka The Big Brawl). The Jackie Chan vehicle drew more from the actor’s recent action-comedies, and the tone could be why it never reached the popularity of either Dragon or Bloodsport despite a very colorful cast of fighters.

In the mid-80s, the timing was perfect for a more serious take on the martial arts tournament film with a Western action star, something that wouldn’t have seemed feasible before the runaway success of 1984’s The Karate Kid. Though Jean-Claude Van Damme has always been treated as a sort of joke, his casting makes a kind of sense even setting aside his martial arts background.Die Hard’s everyman hero would hit the theaters just a few months after Bloodsport, but the slab-of-animate-beef protagonists popularized by Arnold Schwarzanegger were already falling out of fashion. Van Damme’s angular features were just a bit softer, his accented English just a bit more familiar, his proportions just a bit more human than Schwarzanegger’s. Van Damme must have seemed like the perfect Arnold-lite action star heading into the 1990s.

The enduring popularity of Bloodsport is, I think, inevitably intertwined with the arcade fighting game boom of the 1990s. The original Street Fighter, released in 1987, shares a lot of DNA with Bloodsport even if there’s no direct line to be drawn between the two. Capcom has cited Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon and Game of Death as influential in developing the game’s characters and story. When Van Damme’s Frank Dux makes friends with fellow American competitor Jackson, played by Donald Gibb, it’s over a few matches in 1984 arcade fighter Karate Champ, another point of reference for Street Fighter’s development team. It’s even the case that Street Fighter’s protagonists Ryu and Ken are often referred to as using Shotokan karate, the same style in which Van Damme originally trained.

It was Street Fighter II, which took arcades by storm in 1991, that really broke through culturally, and this second installment was even closer in spirit to Bloodsport. For fans of the film, here was an arcade game that felt as though you could play through the film’s scenario. It was as though you could point to any of Bloodsport’s fighters and participate in the kumite as that character! For fans of the arcade game, with big- and small-screen adaptations still years away, Bloodsport was the closest thing there was to a Street Fighter movie. When production of 1994’s live-action Street Fighter feature did get under way, it’s no surprise that Capcom reportedly requested Van Damme be cast as Guile; like Frank Dux in Bloodsport, Guile is an American military officer who leaves his home nation to participate in a secretive fighting tournament.

I think Bloodsport is quite unlike most action, and even martial arts, cinema because the draw of its action is primarily about the individual bouts, the oddball matchups of different fighting styles. Bloodsport, with absolutely no sense of irony, threw a bunch of different fighters into a fantasy martial arts tournament because it felt cool. The film is a cultural artifact of a time before Mixed Martial Arts spoiled that fantasy in the real world; Polygon’s Patrick Gill has a great video that discusses how this continues to affect fighting games. Where other action films are focused on spectacle, on stunts, or on mind-blowing choreography, watching Bloodsport is really about watching a live-action fighting game. It’s the simple pleasure of Bolo Yeung beating up an aikido practitioner, of Jean-Claude Van Damme going kick-for-kick with an actual muay thai champion, of seeing a really big guy fight a really small guy.

Bloodsport is unique in the pantheon of action films because it is pure wish-fulfillment and very little else, released at a time when films could get away with being this self-serious (though just barely). It’s not a good movie by critical standards, it’s not even that good of an action movie; just consider it in comparison to any other film on this list. What it does have in common with the rest of the list is that it is a heck of a good time. Movies don’t have to be good to be worth watching and, if you need proof, Bloodsport is irrefutable.