Where I Watched It: Netflix

English Audio Description Provided By: Zoo Digital

Narrated By: Jackie Cruz

One of those days I found myself browsing Netflix for the next big thing. The new hotness. I noticed this random film, We Die Young tht I never heard of, and i first checked to see if it had English Audio Description. Yes. Then I let it tell me what the movie was about, and after reading the plot summary, I got the top 3 actors, and actor #3 was jean Claude Van Damme.

It’s been a minute since I last checked in on Van Damme and his career. i believe the last thing was his show for Amazon. So, I wanted to know if Van Damme was still kickboxing his way through life. Not really.

This thing is a D-list release about gang violence that casts a rather annoying teen lead that likely fell out of a CW pilot as some hardened gangster, who is so powerful that he has shot up the ranks of MS13. Hard to believe. Even harder to believe is his obnoxious kid brother trying to act a fool. All of this takes place in Washington DC, and if you thought they would do something interesting with that, you would be wrong.

Van Damme pops up as an older white dude that is buying pain meds from our protagonist, and when the shit goes down, it takes him a while to get involved. After all, he’s getting too old for this shit. But, when everything has hit the fan, and bodies are dropping, finally Van Damme strolls in with a gun. it’s one of his least involved performances, and his main goal here seeems to be playing a white savior character whose demons will lead to a tragic sacrifice that just might turn the life’s of these kids around.

No one in this film can act, except perhaps this one gang member in a lieutenant role, whose intensity level on a scale of 1 to Scarface is a full double Scarface, and did a legitimate job of convincing me that he was in a gang. The leader? not so much. Our main teen? Definitely not. But this guy with a machete fetish? Yeah. He’s on his game.

I went in for Van Damme expecting at least some level of corny action, but no. This film wants to be some serious thought provoking gang drama, and it isn’t even good at doing that. It starts off being profound by declaring that today is both the best and worst day of our lead character’s life. For the audience, it will not be the best.

The Blind Perspective: The only thing I really have to say, is that since we can’t appear to have complete accessibility, sometimes it bothers me when something like this that has almost no recognizable cast members, and has been sent to netflix to die, has somehow managed to have audio description read by a human. But there are classic films, and log running TV shows that don’t have it. The walking dead is an 11 season, Emmy nominated show that at one point was the highest rated show on cable. Nothing. But we have to make sure this piece of shit is accessible, because our priorities are straight.in a perfect world, everything has AD. In this realistic world we live in, it’s annoying as shit to think that this film has audio description, while I’m certain there are several Oscar winners/nominees that don’t..

Final Grade: D+