Steven Seagal vs Jean Claude Van Damme | Battle Of The Century

The transcript below is from the video “Steven Seagal vs Jean Claude Van Damme – Battle Of The Century – The Quest And Attack Force” by Space Ice.

Space Ice:

Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal are known for being two of the greatest action stars in movie history. What they’re not known for is being competent writers. We’re going to compare their movies they starred in and wrote Jean-Claude Van Damme’s The Quest and Steven Seagal’s Attack Force.

Space Ice:

Round 1: Better Stunts

The Quest has standard action movie stunts, like explosions that send people flying to safety instead of actually exploding and completely unnecessary flips and other acrobatics.

Space Ice:

Attack Force challenges your entire view of what stunts even are and gives us talking on the phone while walking, putting your leg down, and turning to the right. While I do respect Seagal, thinking outside the box on what a stunt could be, I have to give the point to Van Damme for not being a lazy embarrassment.

Seagal: 0 – Van Damme: 1

Space Ice:

Seagal: 0 – Van Damme: 1

Space Ice:

In Attack Force, Steven Seagal thought if he and his opponent flailed their arms at each other, it would be badass and look like this. Instead, they just look like teenage girls in a slap fight.

Seagal: 0 – Van Damme: 2

Space Ice:

Round 3: Better Villain

The main villain from The Quest is Khan, the champion from Mongolia. He is built up by smashing a giant table with his fist and completely manhandling Japan Sumo champion.

Space Ice:

In Attack Force, the main villain is a 24-year-old girl, who weighs around 120 lbs and has shown absolutely zero fighting ability.

Seagal: 0 – Van Damme: 3

Space Ice:

Round 4: Best Kick

The Quest is full of Van Damme’s trademark jumping spin kicks and there are a lot to choose from.

Space Ice:

Attack Force has Seagal lifting his knee as high as he can, which isn’t very, and somehow sends his opponent flying. He thought that was so badass, he had to do it again. While Seagal’s kicks might look slow and lazy they are so powerful that they almost destroyed the entire home. Before I award a point, I do have to show you this. Yes, we are expected to believe that Steven Seagal somehow did a spin kick here.

So, while Van Damme gets a point, Seagal loses one for insulting his audience’s intelligence.

Seagal: -1 – Van Damme: 4

Space Ice:

Round 5: Most Coherent Story

This is a tough one. The Quest’s story is all over the place. It involves New York orphan pickpockets, pirates, gangsters, slaves, a blimp heist, and underground fighting tournaments. Oh yeah, also a man in his 90s with superpowers. It’s like Van Damme thought the way to make the best movie was to just make it be every movie and didn’t give a sh*t how it all fit together.

Space Ice:

Attack Force is the exact opposite. The story can be boiled down to bad guys are drug dealers and Seagal slaps them all to death.

Seagal: -1 – Van Damme: 5

Space Ice:

Round 6: Completely Abandoned Plot Points

The Quest starts off with Van Damme taking care of a group of orphan Robin Hood before being forced to flee and then never mentions them again.

Space Ice:

Attack Force has Steven Seagal trying to solve the murder of his elite military unit but forgets all about that and now just wants to kill drug dealers. The drug dealers are working for unknown people high up in the Russian government and put drugs into Paris’s water supply. They all seem like important parts of the story but are never resolved and the credits just roll.

I’m going to give the point to Van Damme because kids are dumb and he was right to just forget about them.

Seagal: -1 – Van Damme: 6

Space Ice:

Round 7: Less Confusing Speech

The Quest shows Van Damme as a small child in New York being spoken to in English, grows up in New York, and yet somehow as an adult has a thick Belgian accent. That is never explained and nobody seems to notice.

Space Ice:

Steven Seagal couldn’t even be bothered to say half of his own lines. They are clearly dubbed by someone who sounds nothing like him. Not only does he spend half the movie sounding like Martin Sheen, but he goes back and forth between voices in the exact same scene.

Seagal: -1 – Van Damme: 7

Space Ice:

Round 8: Best Show of Agility

Van Damme’s running around on stilts, doing flip kicks, spin kicks, parkour, you know, JCVD things.

Space Ice:

Attack Force has this incredible scene where Steven Seagal lightly jogs for a couple of seconds. They even went the extra mile and edited out the wheezing. While that is commendable and also the best running he has ever done in his entire career, it’s also completely embarrassing.

Seagal: -1 – Van Damme: 8

Space Ice:

Round 9: Best Show of Emotion

In The Quest, Van Damme once again puts on an Oscar-worthy performance by showing the anger over a needlessly injured friend or brother.

Space Ice:

While this should be Seagal’s round to take, he once again goes the entire movie without even one emotion. The closest he gets is appearing to be pissed off by this dead body for being in his way. In the previous shot, you could see he had room to get past the door, so what the f*ck are you even doing? Whatever!

Seagal: -1 – Van Damme: 9

Space Ice:

Round 10: More Believable Badass

In The Quest, we’re supposed to believe that this character is the heavyweight Boxing champion of the world. He’s clearly in his mid-40s and looks to be about 25 lbs below heavyweight.

Space Ice:

In Attack Force, you have the opposite problem and the butterball-esque Steven Seagal is somehow able to dodge strikes while barely being able to move. He also wrote the scene that he puts in all his movies, where everyone just sits around and talks about how much of a badass he is.

The tiebreaker is once again this hilarious kick that I’m starting to believe somebody threw in there as a joke but Seagal is so full of himself that he saw it and thought, yeah, I can definitely do that.

Seagal: -1 – Van Damme: 10

Space Ice:

This is the final round and it’s still anyone’s game.

Round 11: The Better Dancer

Both are amazing dancers whose dances have won Oscars, Tony’s, Grammys, Pulitzers and Nobel prizes. This is the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make but I’ll award the point to whoever can do the best splits into butt wiggle back into splits. And there you have it.

Seagal: -1 – Van Damme: 11

Space Ice:

So there it is, after 11 rounds, the final score is Van Damme: 11, Steven Seagal: -1. Congratulations Van Damme, you wrote a better movie than this guy. That is certainly something to be very proud of.