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Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Second in Command is set in the civil war torn Eastern European country of Moldovia, there the situation is at critical as the newly elected President Yuri Amirev (Serban Celea) tries to Govern his people. However he has a huge insurgent problem, a 500 plus strong group of militia lead by Anton Tavarov (Velibor Topic), while trying to storm the Presidential Palace & seize control of the country several civilians are shot & killed by Palace guards which sends the angry mob into a violent frenzy. At the US Embassy ambassador George Norland (Colin Stinton) & his second in command, ex navy seal Commander Sam Keenan (Jean-Claude Van Damme), organise & carry out rescue mission in which President Amirev is saved from the insurgents & sheltered in the US Embassy. With US relations already low in Moldavia the Embassy becomes the point of attack for the insurgents who are determined to overthrow President Amirev...This American Romanian co-production was directed by Simon Fellows & as far as I am concerned Second in Command is pretty poor even by JCVD standards whose films are usually fun & watchable if nothing else. The script is a sort of poor mans cross between Black Hawk Down (2001) with it's story about US military soldiers trapped in some anti American country up against local militia with the base under siege plot of Assault on Precinct 13 (1976, 2005) & there's even a Zulu (1964) style against all the odds fight at the end where the good guy's are badly outnumbered by the enemy but still carry on under impossible odds. To give Second in Command some credit I thought the story was alright & it certainly moves along at a good pace, there isn't much boring exposition but that obviously comes at the expense of the character's & the marines in particular suffer in this regard as it's very difficult to tell who is who since they all look the same & aren't even given names. The action is quite small scale, JCVD doesn't get to use his moves very often, there's that whole somewhat cheesy American patriotism in the face of overwhelming odds type sentimentality & was it just me or did it seem like no-one else lived in Moldovia apart from US soldiers & heavily armed insurgents? Where were the local population?As usual JCVD gets to be the hero, despite all the evidence pointing to one solution & one way JCVD opposes it for no good reason & then turns out to be totally right & he gets to save the day, save the US civilians, the Moldovian President & therefore the entire country. Just in a days work for JCVD really. The storyline in Second in Command is very topical & could be said to be based on some sort of realistic foundation, or you could say Second in Command uses the current political climate to hang a less than average JCVD action flick on. Whichever way you want to look at it I suppose. The single most annoying & irritating aspect of Second in Command is the cinematography, it's awful shaky hand-held camcorder stuff which I just hate anyway. You know, it's when the camera twitches, jerks, sways & just feels like it's being operated by someone who is drunk. I hate hand-held shaky camcorder cinematography, it's used quite often these days yet I don't know a single person who likes it. Why do filmmakers continue to use this style? Where's the evidence that people actually like it? The action set-pieces aren't great, there's a few shoot-outs, a couple of fights, an exploding bus & that's about it.With a supposed budget of about $12,000,000 Second in Command feels very cheap, the awful hand-held cinematography, the small scale action & some poor CGI work don't help either. Although set in Moldovia this was filmed in Bucharest in Romania. The acting isn't anything to write home about & JCVD seems to be on autopilot here & pretty much phones in his performance.Second in Command is very much second rate JCVD, if this is anything to go by his Universal Solider (1992), Hard Target (1993), Timecop (1994) & Sudden Death (1995) days are long behind him. Still, he has made worse than this although that's certainly no recommendation.

The title of this movie at once reminds me of those instantly forgettable direct-to-video movies that seem to come out by the hundreds, but soon you realize that it is the perfect title for this story. The story takes place in a country called Moldavia, where there is much internal strife over an alleged order that the president gave, which led to a huge amount of innocent deaths. An insurgency rises, demanding that the president be tried in their custody, which presumably would consist of not much more than a brief mention of his crimes followed by torture and execution. That's just an assumption, of course. Van Damme plays Commander Sam Keenan, a Navy Seal sent in to handle the situation, which grows increasingly desperate and dire. One of the best things about the film is how realistically it presents the mass protests, which are so good that I imagine they must have used stock footage of real protests. Either way, they are seamlessly integrated into the film. Unfortunately, the one street on which the majority of the exterior scenes are filmed looks strikingly like a soundstage, but no matter. The gunfights, another easily botched element, are quite well done here. There is an authority battle as the clearly competent Keenan struggles to convince the commanders around him of a course of action that might save everyone but may also be more dangerous, while others in the top echelon immediately decide upon the tactic that will certainly save some lives but also certainly doom others. Keenan plays a pretty generic hero in this way, going the more dangerous route to save more lives, but it is undeniable that this is Van Damme at his highest class. He's not given a lot of meaningful stuff to do (he gets to say cool lines like "Get the people to the TLU and the president to the ACR. Go!"), but this is one of his best performances.His primary assignment is to hold off the impending insurgent force while both the American military and the Croatian army close in, conveniently with exactly the same ETA. You know something big is going to happen soon. Sadly, the CGI air support is pretty dismal, but it serves its purpose. The leader of the insurgency is also a little too much of a movie villain, although I like the final confrontation between him and Keenan (which would be a spoiler, but did you really think that wouldn't happen?), in which Keenan does something that reveals a deep flaw in his character. It's something that some people in the military might like to do to the bad guys in real life, but not the kind of thing you expect from a benevolent movie hero. And by the way, I love how, even with the sheer magnitude of firepower in the movie, it all comes down to a hand-to-hand knife fight.The movie ends with a sufficiently cheesy scene, although it stands out as a pretty glaring omission that the true guilt or innocence of the president, who allegedly caused so many deaths, was never proved one way or the other. I have been learning a lot about Mao Tse- tung lately, which has led to a gigantic mistrust of certain governments and powerful individuals. I guess we have to assume that he didn't commit the crime of which he was accused. Maybe they were banking on the "Insurgents" vs. the "President," so people would automatically assume who were the bad guys and who was the good guy. Too bad it's not that clear cut in real life

In the Eastern European nation of Moldavia, the new appointed prime minister is facing some political resistance, where some figures want to take him down. To do so, they plan a sniper to shoot an innocent civilian, which makes it look like the prime minister's guards were shooting. Riots break out and it's up to American marine Sam Keenan to get the prime minister to the American Embassy for protection. Soon they find out there's a large militia group outside the Embassy and they want the prime minister. So the small group of American soldiers and civilians hold up inside and try to wait for reinforcements, while the well-armed insurgents surround the building.Jean Claude Van Damme has kind of been in the wilderness of churning out straight to DVD junk over the last decade, but honestly on this occasion what entertaining junk "Second in Command" turned out to be. As Van Damme action vehicles go, "Second in Command" is a modest action thriller joint that delivers the goods in a fast-paced and intense fashion, even though the whole one-idea set-up is familiarly derived. It does comes off, though. "The Alamo" reference is fitting to what you're seeing and it also takes some tips from Ridley Scott's frenetic "Black Hawk Down". The premise starts off at a breakneck pace and then tightly builds up to its chaotic siege situation with a exhilarating climax with some organic grit. Along the way it offers up a surprise or two and there's no real political interference in how they shape the story, despite the topic at hand and flawed nature. Logic is lacking and it's far from clever. The basic script won't set the film alight, but never falls into any cheesy mumbling. It's an old school layout with new technology adding to the glitz. The camera-work has that natural doco-style intrusion with many nauseating movements, fast editing is razor sharp, slow-motion gets a look in and the musical score has a cutting techno jibe that stays in the background. I usually can't stand these types of novel techniques, but it was easy to swallow because it never gets overwhelmed by it all. The action scenes, which for this type of film is what we are actually hanging around for. Are handled with great vigour and the set-pieces can raise a sweat. Those looking for Van Damme's crisply striking martial arts skills will get very little of it, even though it boasts a few exciting one-one combat scenes (mainly the climax with the lead bad guy), but instead there are ample explosions and raining gunfire that makes sure this parade is aggressively violent. There's plenty of bang for your buck! The robust direction by Simon Fellows can build up the tension effectively and it does well to staying to its strengths, as it feels larger than it actually is, because it works around its budget restraints to achieve an honest attempt. The film location was in Romania, but you can easily tell when they were staged on sets and the real stock footage interwoven into the film sticks out clearly. They do get that washed out look with a dusty and at times hazy air forming in certain sequences. Jean Claude Van Damme is capably good and fit's the mould perfectly, with his downtrodden and workman like performance of a more beatable and humane character than anything overly heroic. Yeah he ain't bad at all. The rest of the support performances are agreeable enough."Second in Command" is a bold, noisy, ultra-zippy action film, which doesn't kick up anything of special importance or originality, but to simply entertain. It enjoyably succeeds and never lets a flat note get hold.

This is another American bullshit....Same old plot...Eastern European country...Communists ....a smart ass cowboy....And you call Jean Claude an actor?This is another "US Army Is The Best" movie...In fact the movie has no action, nothing seems to have a target, everything according to the eternal "we are Americans, we will win anyway"No matter that I have 1.50m, i have no idea what fighting means, but I am American...and in eastern Europe...I am the King.... The replies are a weird combination of romanian and Serbian No attention to these details?An advice, next time....make A MOVIE