Ben Archer (Van Damme) is a mob enforcer who has seen a fair amount of action in his time but he has finally decided the time is right to retire.  He loves his family very much and wants to put the savage lifestyle behind him so that he can spend more time with his wife and son.  However, a wise man once said that the best laid plans often go to pot and they couldn't have been more right if they were looking at Ben Archer's life.  When his wife, a social worker, takes a young Chinese immigrant girl into their home, she doesn't quite realise she is holding onto the child of Sun Quan (Simon Yam), one of the biggest Triad gangsters in Hong Kong.  When Quan comes calling for his daughter he doesn't mess around and slays everybody in his path including Ben's wife.  Unfortunately for Quan, Ben isn't the type of person to take these kinds of things lying down and he has only one thought on his mind - bloody and absolute revenge!

In cinematic terms, the simple story of a man seeking retribution for the loss of a loved one is generally a successful one as it instantly gets the audience cheering for the hero and provides a quick and easy motif for numerous action scenes.  However, in the case of 'Wake Of Death' there's something extremely average and lacking about the whole affair.  For one thing, I don't think you ever really care enough about Van Damme's character to fully empathise with his situation and the sequences involving his loss just seem overly dramatic.  Added to this, Van Damme never seems that bothered about his wife's demise (aside from a couple of hazy romantic flashbacks and a few tears) and he appears to forget about his true purpose far too quickly.  Performances from the actors are also extremely mundane with Van Damme doing little more than grimacing for the majority of the film whilst Simon Yam is once again utterly wasted in an American production.  There are also a couple of graphic sex scenes thrown in for good measure (yes people, you'll be glad to hear we do get to see Van Damme's arse yet again) but these seem very out of place as they serve no particular purpose.

As far as the action goes, there's one simple word to sum it all up - brief.  Despite the fact that there are a couple of well presented and put together set-pieces, the majority of it is far too short lived to ever allow the viewer to fully appreciate it.  This is particularly noticeable in the fight sequences which generally seem to consist of one formula - Van Damme punches, bad guy punches and Van Damme floors the bad guy.  It's true that both Van Damme and the stunt guys do look capable (and show off a couple of decent kicks as well) but it would have been nice if one of the fights had lasted longer than two hits.  On the positive side, a couple of the vehicle stunts do exceed expectations, in particular a very refreshing slant on a motorcycle chase through a shopping mall but like the rest of the action scenes, it does seem to come to a very speedy conclusion.

Having heard so many positive things about 'Wake Of Death', I was surprised to see that this is really nothing more than a relatively bland revenge flick.  It has a few spurts of entertaining action and maintains a degree of watchability but it's nowhere near the standards required to restore Van Damme's status as an A-list Hollywood star.