Jean-Claude Van Damme has starred in dozens of action movies, but arguably his most overlooked also happens to be his directorial debut. My love of martial arts began in childhood, which naturally sent me down an infinite rabbit hole of watching every martial arts flick I could get my hands on and studying a wide variety of different disciplines. That also made me quite a fan of the Muscles from Brussels himself, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and one who continues to wonder why his 1996 directorial debut The Quest doesn’t get more love.
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Set in 1925, The Quest follows a young fighter named Christopher Dubois (Van Damme), who enters a secret martial arts tournament in Tibet known as the Ghang-gheng. To say The Quest blew my expectations out of the water wouldn’t come close to covering it, but I remain perplexed at how little it is discussed as a clear highlight of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s career. Here’s why, in my estimation, The Quest is Van Damme’s most underrated movie.
The Quest Was Van Damme’s Second PG-13 Movie (& Handled Much Better Than Street Fighter)
Like many Hollywood action heroes of the ’80s and ’90s, Jean-Claude Van Damme largely appeared in R-rated fare while simultaneously building up a sizeable fan base among kids and younger audiences, even inspiring many with his kicks and splits to take up martial arts. Van Damme made his first foray in the PG-13 world as Colonel Guile in 1994’s Street Fighter. Unfortunately, while Street Fighter was a sizeable box office success, the movie’s campy, cartoonish tone and divergences from the Street Fighter video games earned it little favor among fans of the games or general audiences. With that said, Raúl Juliá’s tremendously energetic performance as General M. Bison, if nothing else, made Street Fighter both genuinely entertaining and absurdly quotable (I count myself as someone who unapologetically knows virtually every Bison line by heart), but it also wasn’t exactly what most Van Damme fans had in mind for his first PG-13 movie.
In taking a second shot at a PG-13 outing with The Quest, Van Damme delivered far better on what a PG-13 Van Damme martial arts epic promised — and, for that matter, on the sprawling martial arts tournament setting of Street Fighter that the 1994 movie forsook. With The Quest, Van Damme knew just how far to dial back his usual R-rated output to work in a PG-13 sandbox, with both adult and younger audiences still getting the Van Damme experience they were sold on. In doing so in the movie that was also his directorial debut, Van Damme made The Quest relatively age appropriate for nearly every audience demographic. In essence, Van Damme made The Quest into the movie his youngest fans thought they were getting with Street Fighter.
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The Quest Is A Gorgeous Movie To Behold & Takes Its Tournament Setting Seriously
Another side of The Quest‘s charm is that the movie itself is simply a visual feast. Filmed on location in Thailand, the movie makes ample use of the gorgeous Thai scenery at every turn. Thailand is a rather frequent location used in the making of martial arts films, including numerous Van Damme titles like Kickboxer and the aforementioned Street Fighter. Even still, The Quest goes out of its way to emphasize its location’s lush scenery, highlighting the adventurous nature of the story and presenting it as unfolding in a true paradise.
Additionally, the arena of the Ghang-gheng itself is one perfectly suited for a martial arts tournament film, and one that suggests Van Damme did a fair amount of homework in aligning the movie with martial arts history. The platform that the Ghang-gheng’s fights unfold upon and the tournament’s general rules closely resemble those of Chinese lei tai fights. Historically, the lei tai was a raised platform where two fighters would duel, with the lei tai still in use today for many modern kung fu sanda fights. Van Damme clearly wanted to present The Quest as a visually breathtaking adventure with a touch of historical dressing, and it’s fair to say the movie succeeded in doing so.
The Quest Is Full Of Phenomenal Martial Artists & Fight Sequences
When you think of a Van Damme movie, you think of high-flying spinning kicks and intense fight scenes, but even I didn’t expect just how much The Quest would deliver on both in spades. The tournament of the Ghang-gheng consists of 16 international fighters, each introduced by their respective homeland’s name, and each extolling a different discipline of martial arts. For a lifelong martial arts nerd like myself, The Quest was the sort of thing I lived for, with every discipline from all four corners of the Earth thrown into the mix. One has to wonder if The Quest has accrued any new surge in popularity among modern audiences with MMA becoming the phenomenon that it is, but as a kid, The Quest played like an even more epic rendition of Bloodsport, getting a head start on MMA before it was cool.
What’s also interesting about The Quest‘s fight scenes is not only how intense and well-designed they are, but how much Van Damme himself steps a bit out of the spotlight. Obviously, the rotation of the tournament’s competitors made that somewhat necessary, but Van Damme also uses the Ghang-gheng to really highlight the skills of some outstanding martial artists, particularly Wushu champion Peter Wong as the Chinese fighter, Taekwondo kicking machine Peter Malota as the Spanish fighter, and César Carneiro as the Brazilian Capoeira fighter. While the large quantity of fights in the Ghang-gheng keeps most of them relatively short, Van Damme and fight choreographer Steven Lambert really give the ensemble a chance to shine in glorious fashion.
The fight scenes in The Quest were also plenty of motivation for me to follow the subsequent careers of several of the movie’s fighters, including Mike Lambert as the Scottish Fighter, best known for fighting Jet Li in Unleashed. He has since gone on to be a major Hollywood fight choreographer. The Quest is the kind of movie martial arts geeks find a lot of “That guys” in, i.e. stuntmen and screen fighters who frequently pop up in fight scenes and make a lasting impression. Suffice to say, Lambert and quite a few others in The Quest, like Habby Heske and the late Stefanos Miltsakakis, were prime examples of “That guy” in the ’90s and early 2000s for martial arts fans.
Van Damme’s own final fight scene against the towering Mongolian boxer Khan (Abdel Qissi) is also one of the most intense and memorable of his career, with Van Damme making sure to implement his signature helicopter kick for good measure. With epic and gorgeously filmed martial arts tournament sequences and an enthralling score by Randy Edelman, The Quest simply had me enamored, as it featured everything the young martial arts fanboy in me craved. Even with all of those attributes, The Quest doesn’t seem to have been enshrined as one of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s best movies since its release. I’m of the opinion that The Quest is as Van Damme as any Van Damme movie can get, and hopefully, the MMA age will usher in a new era of belated popularity for it.
