Ganar o Morir (Nowhere to Run, 1993)

It is a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, and I watched it on TV dubbed into Spanish, so as far as I am concerned, it is called Ganar o Morir, which means "Win or Die." (Imdb says it is called "Nowhere to Run." I don't know why they couldn't call it "Ningún Sitio Adonde Huir," or "Sin Posibilidad de Escapar," but whatever.) I will tell you that there were a few plot points I never got, in part because I watched the movie with my father-in-law and I was translating it from Spanish as we went so sometimes I wouldn't hear some of the dialogue.

Anyway, the movie starts with a prison bus driving across a desert highway. Van Damme is on the bus. He is a prisoner. An awesome red Corvette with black racing stripes passes the bus in the oncoming traffic lane, which isn't so surprising because it's a two-lane highway in the middle of nowhere and buses go slow, but the bus driver, who is wearing aviator shades, starts to bug out a little because the Corvette kinda just paces the bus without passing for a little while. At this moment, Van Damme looks out the window portentously, and we understand that the driver of the Corvette is his confederate. Then the Corvette does a crazy move that they probably teach you in cop car driving school, where it pulls abruptly in front of the bus, cutting it off in such a way that the bus driver turns the wheel hard to the right and the bus rolls over on its side. The Corvette skids to a stop a short distance ahead of the bus, and all the prisoners in the bus, who are handcuffed to their seats, start bitching about how the bus driver, who is unconscious from the crash, is a lousy driver.

The other guard who was on the bus grabs a shotgun and goes out to the Corvette, where the driver appears to be unconscious and slumped over the wheel. Naturally, he is really fine, and as soon as the guard lowers his shotgun and says, "Are you alright?" the driver sits up and points a pistol at the guard and says, "I'd be much better if you put that gun down!" So he takes the guard hostage. The Corvette driver makes the guard unlock everyone's handcuffs and all the convicts start running off in every direction. Probably the reason that some of these guys became convicts is that they had no manners, because some of them go and try to steal the very Corvette that just moments earlier was the engine of their liberty, so the driver and Jean-Claude Van Damme have to go kick their asses. This takes only moments, and then they are on their way. They drive far enough for the driver of the Corvette, who is now in the passenger seat, to tell Jean-Claude that he is so glad to break him out, because he's the one who should have been in prison anyway, and then the previously unconscious bus driver comes to, gets a rifle, and very carefully aims at the fleeing muscle car and fires one shot. The camera does that bullet's eye view thing where it zooms toward the target, and the the rear window of the Corvette shatters and Jean-Claude's friend is shot in the back. He says, "Good timing - I couldn't have died with your imprisonment on my conscience," then he dies. Inexplicably, there is a shovel in the Corvette, which Van Damme uses to bury his friend somewhere with a scenic sunset in the background.

The next day, Van Damme has traded in his prison jumpsuit for a grey suit and white shirt with no tie. He stops at a convenience store and the news is on, talking about the prisoner escape, and the old guy who works at the store looks at him funny and says, "You're not from around here, are ya?" and Van Damme says, no, he's here to go hunting, and the old guy is like, "in a suit?" and Van Damme says he staying with some friends, and that is the end of that weird interaction.

In fact, Van Damme is staying by a lake in a wooded area, which was apparently the agreed-upon meeting spot for him and his buddy in the event of a jailbreak, because there is a tent and an old ammo box full of money, and a tape recorder, on which his buddy has recorded a message, to the effect of "if you're hearing this, I guess I'm not there to split the money with you, but anyway, it was nice knowing you and you were a good friend." Hearing this gets Van Damme choked up. Later, around dusk, he pushes the Corvette into the lake, which is a shame, then creeps through the woods at night and spies a farmhouse, which he goes and looks into. Inside, Rosanna Arquette is putting her two young kids (a son and a daughter) to bed and then getting somewhat undressed, which Van Damme watches with a mixture of tension and melancholy. Once she is in bed, he goes inside, creeps around a bit, steals the salt shaker, and has to run off because the son, who is about ten, wakes up and comes downstairs. The son sees a figure retreating into the dark across a pasture and smiles, which is totally not how I would react to weird intruders, but I didn't grow up in the country. The son, by the way, is played by McCaulay Culkin's little brother whose name I don't remember. Anyway, the next morning, the son says something about someone coming in the house and the mom brushes it off and we come to understand that the absence of a father (we will learn at some point that the dad died of a stroke) has led to this boy's having a rich inner life. Also, the salt is missing. Also, the whole house shakes for a little while and you can hear explosions in the distance, but Rosanna Arquette and her kids are totally calm, and in this way we learn that there is mining going on nearby. Then, to cement that knowledge, we see an old, fat-cat businessman in an office in a construction trailer at . . .surprise, a mine. He is sitting with a sinister-looking guy in slightly high-waisted pants (though not as high-wasted as Van Damme's because holy fuck, that guy's pants are up to his fucking armpits in every single movie he's in). The sinister guy is the guy who played the killer in Silence of the Lambs - not Hannibal Lecter, but Mr. "It puts the lotion on its skin, or it gets the hose again." Anyway, he's there and they're talking about getting Mrs. Anderson to sell her land (aha! Rosanna Arquette is the lone holdout, a la "You Can't Take It With You," except Frank Capra would roll over in his grave if he knew anyone in the whole history of filmgoing had compared his magnum opus to "Ganar o Morir"), and fat-cat says he's not sure the local sheriff can do the job and serial killer says, "I'll handle it," and just then the local sheriff walks in, and his name is Looney, and serial killer suggests that he is sleeping with Mrs. Anderson (that is, Rosanna Arquette) and Looney doesn't deny it, but still assures fat-cat that he will persuade her to sell her land, and fat-cat gives him a manila envelope, and serial killer does a card trick but fails to fins Looney's card, until Looney is outside in his car and opens the manila envelope and sees the two of clubs there (along with a lot of cash), and the audience is like, Whoa! This serial killer, like Wu-Tang, ain't nothin' to fuck with!

That night, Looney and Mrs. Anderson have sex (I think - they don't show it, but you see them come out of the house onto the porch and he says, "I liked that," and she says, "Me too." She is in her bathrobe, which implies recent nudity, but he's still in his dorky sheriff's outfit, so it could be that they just watched a movie or ate some exceptionally good Chinese take-out. This is a failure of the narrative, but they do kiss during the scene, so we at least know that they're more than just friends.) Jean-Claude Van Damme is lurking in the shadows by the barn and watches them, and at this point we have no idea why the hell he's picked this particular single mom / farmer / property owner to stalk.

The next morning, Jean-Claude is washing up in the lake when Mrs. Anderson's son, Maury, comes around and they chat. We learn that Van Damme is named Sam. Sam asks Maury not to tell his mom that Sam is camping there. Maury's little sister comes around too, and she says she will tell. Apparently, though, she doesn't tell.

That night, Mrs. Anderson is coming home with the kids in her beat-up pick-up truck (none of them are wearing seatbelts) when two mean guys start smashing the truck with bats. One also has a meat hook. They order her out of the car and she refuses and backs up over one of them, but then gets the truck stuck in a ditch, and the mean guys are clearly about to bring the ruckus when Sam shows up and dispenses a two-part ass-whooping to them. One thing about this I didn't like is that in dispatching the second thug, he slams the guy's head against the pick-up truck's headlight, breaking the light. Now, if that had happened accidentally during a brawl, well, fair enough, but it was completely gratuitous - the Muscles from Brussels could just as well have broken his arm, head-butted him, or some other bad-ass move, because the guy was already defeated and this was just the coup de grace. So why break the truck of the person you're trying to help? Anyway, at this point, Mrs. Anderson says, "Thanks. Who are you?" and Maury says, "It's Sam," and I finally realize that Sam really has no prior involvement whatsoever with the family, which makes his continued presence there all the more perplexing. Nevertheless, now that Anderson knows Sam, we learn that he is from Quebec and she invites him to stay in the barn rather than in the tent by the lake, which he accepts. He also eats with the family now, and showers in the main house, which provides an opportunity, the following day, for Looney to surprise him in the shower and pull his service revolver on Sam, who, of course, is standing there naked, and then Mrs. Anderson comes in and sees Sam naked, which lays the groundwork for them having sex another 45 minutes into the film (in fact, their sex scene, which is totally inevitable, comes remarkably late). Also, when Looney asks Sam who he is, Sam says he's a friend, but Mrs. Anderson says he's a distant cousin on her mother's side. This, plus the fact that Sam is totally fucking ripped, makes Looney not like him.

Then there is a Footloose-style, country-bumpkin town meeting at which the fat-cat mine owner tries to convince the townspeople that the mine is a good idea. One townie, who looks like a cross between Bruce Boxleitner and Collin Farrell, is vociferous in his opposition to the mining and storms out, and Silence of the Lambs guy is there and looks at him with scary eyebrows, and in movies, that kind of scary-eyebrow-looking is called "foreshadowing." So later that night some thugs (did I mention that the thugs always wear suits? it's like the director wants to make it very clear that business interests are behind all the misbehavior in this film, to the point where the mining company couldn't even hire local, overall-wearing thugs, because even they recognize how inherently wrong it is to drive hardworking farmers off their land) come and set his barn on fire. Boxleitner-Farrell is out there pulling horses out of the barn and Sam emerges from the night to help. Once the horses and other valuable farm stuff are out, everyone stands back to admire the fire and curse the mining industry, but they see that the flames are burning some hay and reaching the propane tanks, which are conveniently next to a water tower, which is conveniently next to a bulldozer. Sam, in addition to knowing kung fu, apparently knows how to work all those crazy levers on construction machinery, because he runs over and starts driving the bulldozer against the base of the water tower and eventually makes the water fall over and douse the propane tank so there's not a huge explosion. This climax is preceded by several tense, up-close shots of the paint on the side of the propane tank bubbling from the heat of the fire.

The next day, some guys from the mining company, including the fat-cat businessman, who is the same actor who once played some sort of mean South African in some movie I saw a long time ago, and probably had a role on the short-lived show, Manimal (which was awesome), and also probably on the A-Team (does that give you a sense of him? he's a very 80s sort of corporate villain - the sort who would say, "do you have any idea who I am?", which he does later in this movie too) pay a visit to Mrs. Anderson's house in the daytime. The visit is to try to persuade Mrs. Anderson to sell her land, which she refuses to do. She tells the fat-cat, "I was behind on the mortgage but it was worked out with the bank till you started meddling." Fat-cat says, "You can avoid losing lots of money if you just sell to me." Then Sam walks into the room (did I mention before that he told Mrs. Anderson that he was a lawyer in Quebec? It is never clear if he really is a lawyer (although he would surely have been disbarred after going to prison, even if he was wrongly convicted)) and says all this stuff about how a foreclosure would take a long time and would be costly for the bank, so if Mrs. Anderson wants to keep her land, she should just not sell and that's that. The fat-cat asks Sam how he knows all this and Sam says he was a lawyer in Quebec, and when the fat-cat offers his hand to introduce himself, Sam looks at the hand real suspiciously, as if he were visiting a foreign culture and had just been asked to participate in a strange custom, and couldn't decide if it was a real custom that he should go along with so as not to seem rude, or a made-up custom that the foreigners were pretending to have just so he would go along with it and they could get a laugh. Eventually, Sam shakes the guy's hand, but the look he gives to the hand first is indescribably tough, and you know right then who is the bigger and better man. Sam is!

That night, thugs in suits come to Mrs. Anderson's land and have a truck with big 50-gallon drums in the back, which they set to pouring out some brown liquid while the trucks drive slowly around. I assume this was gasoline and they were going to set a fire, but I suppose it could have been chocolate syrup (the scene takes place at night, so it is hard to tell what's going on). Eventually, Sam arrives and beats all these guys up a lot before they have a chance to prove definitively whether the mystery liquid is an accelerant or a condiment.

The next day, fat-cat, Looney, and Silence of the Lambs serial killer have a meeting to figure out what to do about this Canadian troublemaker in their midst. Looney says he found out that Sam is a fugitive and has the idea to simply threaten Sam with disclosure, thus forcing him to get the hell out of town while avoiding undue attention from the state police. Fat-cat actually likes this idea (he is usually disparaging of Looney when he's alone with the serial killer), and so Looney does it. It is convenient because Sam had been working on restoring an old Triumph motorcycle in Mrs. Anderson's barn, and it was just getting finished (because he's also a motorcycle repairman), so he leaves a tape-recorded note to Mrs. Anderson and Maury (with whom he bonded by working with him on the motorcycle project) and then hits the road. He stops at a diner to eat and has a brief conversation with a state trooper there, who admires the motorcycle. Sam's foreign accent, coupled with his leaving right away and leaving a whole steak uneaten on his plate, makes the trooper suspicious, so he takes down the motorcycle's license plate, and somehow, despite the fact that it was presumably the same plate that had sat on the rusted bike in the barn for all those years, they trace it to Sam and find him camping somewhere in some ravine, and he's just chilling, making a campfire, and then he does a little twitching-listening thing, then suddenly leaps in the air, lands on the bike, and starts going just as a bazillion cops converge on him, and apparently they're pretty certain it's him, because they make no attempt to detain him, they just start shooting shooting shooting. There's a couple of classic Chevy Caprice cop cars that quickly get overturned in a ditch, a police Suburban that runs into a tree, and a highly improbable, bright red police motocross bike, none of which can stop Sam's Triumph, which he jumps over a cop car at one point, without the aid of any visible incline. With some backup, the cops manage to corner him at the edge of a cliff, but then Sam just rides down the side of it (it's not a shear rock wall, but a very steep incline) and gets away.

At that point I had to change Reuben's diaper and fix some food for him, so I lost track a little bit, but when I came back, fat-cat, Looney, and serial killer had attempted to kill or harm Mrs. Anderson, which attempt had been thwarted by Sam, because Looney was tied up in the house. Unfortunately, fat-cat was holding Mrs. Anderson at gunpoint while Sam and serial killer fought. There was a lot of smashing around and knocking old slop sinks off walls and such, and eventually serial killer got a pitchfork and it looked like lights-out for Sam, but Sam did a lot of nice rolls on the ground to avoid getting poked before finally disarming serial killer, giving him some solid punches to the abdomen, and throwing him through the window of Looney's cruiser, at which point Maury appeared to say, "come help, the old guy is holding my mom hostage" and Sam was heading into the house when serial-killer roused himself inside the cruiser, grabbed a rifle, and was about to shoot Sam, and Maury shouted, "Sam!" and Sam turned around and you thought, "Oh fuck, how will he get out of this?" and then, out of nowhere, TEN-YEAR-OLD MAURY HAS A FUCKING LOADED REVOLVER, which he tosses to Sam in slow motion, and we see the long slow arcs described by the flying gun while Mr. Silence of the Lambs, shaky from his encounter with the windshield, tenses his trigger finger and prepares to give it the hose again, and the gun lands perfectly in Sam's hand and blam blam, it's like the part where Jodie Foster caps that guy in the basement when he's wearing the infrared goggles.

Then, anti-climactically, just as Sam is confronting fat-cat, who has a pistol trained on Mrs. Anderson's neck, a whole bunch of cops show up and fat-cat and Sam get arrested. When they're both being put in separate cruisers, fat-cat predictably (and incriminatingly) yells at Sam for messing everything up, and says, "Do you know who I am?" He then bumrushes Sam (they are both handcuffed at this point) and even though there are a million cops around, they let him do this, and Sam, who already has one foot in the cruiser, calmly pushes the cruiser door forward sharply so as to hit fat-cat in the face, then responds, "I know what you are." Bam! He exchanges a meaningful look with Mrs. Anderson, who is on the porch hugging her kids, and then gets in the cruiser. Freeze frame on Sam looking wistful as the cops drive off, and we suddenly realize that this film is a powerful indictment of the whole American system: the only person who can save the average American farmer from the depredations of unchecked capitalism and corrupt, sexually exploitative law enforcement officers, is a Canadian lawyer wrongly imprisoned in the U.S. . . who knows kung-fu!