Kickboxer

Kickboxer is the essential Van Damme vehicle: a simple revenge story elevated by spectacular martial arts and the most famous bar dance in action cinema history. Van Damme plays Kurt Sloane, whose brother is paralyzed by the brutal Thai champion Tong Po. Kurt trains under a wizened master, learns Muay Thai, and returns for vengeance. The training sequences — kicking banana trees, dipping hands in resin and glass — are iconic, and the final fight with hands wrapped in hemp rope is genuinely brutal.

The film is a love letter to Muay Thai, shot on location in Thailand with real fighters as extras. Van Damme’s physicality reaches its peak here — the flexibility, the speed, the commitment to performing every technique himself. And then there’s the bar dance: Van Damme, drunk on Thai whiskey, performing splits and kicks to the beat of a local band. It is the single most Van Damme moment in any Van Damme film.

Kickboxer earned $75 million and, alongside Bloodsport, established Van Damme as the king of martial arts action in the late 1980s.