, has signed on to remake Bloodsport, the martial arts piece that saw the Muscles from Brussels Jean Claude Van Damme as an American competing in an underground, illegal fighting tournament.Why Philip Noyce? Who the hell knows, but he's certainly not my problem with the whole idea. For the most part I love his political stuff like The Quiet American
and Rabbit Proof Fence
, but then he also has some tripe like Sliver
and The Bone Collector
. He gets forever props for heading up two of my favories, Rutger Hauer's Blind Fury 
and Nicole Kidman's Dead Calm
. I just don't want this movie made purely for nostalgia reasons. You know how much I dug Bloodsport? It came out back in 1988 so of course it was all about VHS at the time. I loved that movie so much that I taped it in such a way that only the awesome fight sequences remainded, so I could watch the brutal Kumite anytime I wanted. I watched it so much the tape snapped. I just couldn't get enough of watching Ray Jackson getting his head stomped by the vicious Chong Li.
The script is being handled by Luc Besson favorite, Robert Mark Kamen(Taken
, The Fifth Element
), with the plan to not do a straight ahead remake but a "reinvention". In his version the film “will follow an American who goes to Brazil to recover from the violence he has experienced in Afghanistan who gets involved in a martial arts contest.” So basically the first part of the original story will be scrapped, which probably means whoever will be playing Frank Dux isn't going to be chased around town by a pair of bumbling military investigators.
The question is who could replace JCVD as Dux? More importantly, who could be his rival, the deadly champion Chong Li? Last I saw of Bolo Yeung, he was still in good enough shape to handle it himself, even though he's a million years old now. I so don't want to see this happen but my morbid curiosity is starting to take over.
