From the outset it’s apparent that this movie is a better production than most of Van Damme’s movies. Sudden Death is a proper movie and has a very similar concept to Die Hard.
Van Damme plays a fire marshal working at a Pittsburgh Penguins v Chicago Blackhawks hockey game where he also brought his kids, and it turns out the Vice President is having a party in the owner’s box and has a large security detail but it’s been infiltrated by a highly organised gang of crooks who hold the Vice President and all people in the arena to ransom after rigging the whole place to explode, while everyone’s watching the game oblivious. Van Damme’s character smells something’s up when his daughter gets kidnapped after she witnessed a murder, so Van Damme tracks her down and begins to get to the bottom of the whole operation.
I’m generally not a fan of political dramas, but this movie contains just the right amount of that stuff and has just about strong enough actors to make it work well between the faster action scenes.
There aren’t really any boring bits in this movie, so long as you’ve not seen it already within the last few years. But it’s also pretty standard, in a way. So I rate it Upper-OK.