Review – Legionnaire

Jean Claude Van Damme drops the heavy-duty martial arts stuff in a bid to make a somewhat more serious action movie. The amazing thing about it is that the final product isn’t half bad. Of course it’s not exactly good, either. Naturally, any movie about the French Foreign Legion in the 1920s is going to invite comparisons to the whole Beau Geste thing, and certainly there are plenty of parallels that could be pointed out (the gallant young man fleeing personal crisis and ending up in the hands of a stern Legion commander, and so on). But somewhere amidst the “march or die” and the “blood and honor” nonsense there actually appears to be a worthwhile moral here. More than that I can’t divulge without giving away a chunk of the plot, so suffice it to say that this is a standard action flick with small shreds of conscience stirred in. Mildly amusing