Jean-Claude Van Damme has been working on his own action film with a message since the 2000s, which has already had four different titles and is still a long time coming.
With JCVD in 2008, action star Jean-Claude Van Damme experienced a surprising revival, the momentum of which he wanted to exploit for his own film project with personal significance. So he set about his first directorial work since The Quest and self-produced an action film he wrote himself, with himself in the leading role.
The film is currently once again being released under its original title The Eagle Path, but it has also been called Full Love, Soldiers and Frenchy. However, it still doesn’t appear to have found a distributor.
Jean-Claude Van Damme’s action disaster that is unfinished and can’t find a buyer
In The Eagle Path, former mercenary Frenchy (Van Damme) is a traumatized cab driver in East Asia. When he tries to protect a woman from assassins, he assembles a team of specialists – but then it gets unconventional for an action thriller.
As early as 2010, The Wrap reported on the disastrous screening of the film in Cannes, where Van Damme himself is said to have blocked the exit so that no one could escape his magnum opus. Nevertheless, he still couldn’t find a distributor. Fantastic Fest director Tim League told the magazine: “It could be the biggest embarrassment of his career. Especially when he had given us hope with JCVD.”
In the past, Van Damme had rather discredited himself through questionable behavior on the set, which at the time was still due to his serious addiction problems.
Van Damme’s heart project with obstacles
Surprisingly, Van Damme was able to win Stanley Kubrick’s long-time cameraman Douglas Milsome for his film project, with whom he fell out during the shooting. According to screening participants, the action flick is supposed to end with an ambitious sequence reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey, only to end after the usual non-stop action on an environmental message about love, life and the end of the world. A creative step that no one but Van Damme himself agreed with.
15 years and several re-shoots and re-titles later, The Eagle Path still hasn’t been released. The official website of Rodin Entertainment still says “soon,” but it has been saying that in various forms since 2010.
The cursed film project for the action star of the 80s and 90s is even more personal due to the involvement of his two children Kristopher Van Varenberg and Bianca Bree, who both appeared in the cast. Let’s hope the movie comes out before they reach the present age of their ambitious father. Then we will finally know whether this is a great masterpiece by a former action icon, or a pretentious ego trip disaster like The Room or, more recently, Megalopolis.
