Enemies Closer is a 2013 American action thriller film directed by Peter Hyams and starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Tom Everett Scott, Orlando Jones and Linzey Cocker.

It is Hyams' third directorial collaboration with Van Damme, following 1994's Timecop and 1995's Sudden Death,[3] and the first of these to feature the actor in a villainous role.

[4] The plot follows former Navy SEAL Henry Taylor (Scott) who is marked for death by the mourning brother of a comrade he left behind, only to have to team up with him when they both become targets of the deranged crime lord Xander (Van Damme).

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers prepare to search for the plane, but a group of criminals led by the unstable Xander (Van Damme) kill them and take the coordinates for the crash: a lake just off King's Island.

Director Peter Hyams was offered the film by producer Moshe Diamant, and accepted it both as a show of friendship and as a stylistic exercise.

With the movie's main sequence of events taking place entirely at night and close to water, two highly demanding filming conditions, he saw it as a stimulating challenge, especially given its independent budget and tight shooting schedule, which spanned a period of 27 days.

[8] Van Damme was initially going to play the main protagonist, but Hyams asked him to switch to the part of drug trafficker Xander, as he had already directed him twice in heroic roles and did not want to retread the same ground.

The Belgian was not easily convinced, as he had just played the appropriately named Jean Vilain in The Expendables 2, and demanded his new role be fleshed out so as to differentiate it from the classic archetype he had portrayed in the earlier feature.

[9] With Enemies Closer set in the wilderness, the character was expanded to become a staunch ecologist and vegan,[5][10] and Van Damme personally devised the "Édith the Goose" monologue that appears midway into the film.

[5] Tom Everett Scott, who took over Van Damme's intended part, is a longtime friend of John Hyams, with whom he attended Syracuse University.

[18] Neil Glenzinger of the New York Times found that the collision of the three main characters was "a ridiculous coincidence", but commended Hyams for "[keeping] things moving briskly, building up to an ending with a pretty good plot twist".

[19] Scott Foundas of the Chicago Tribune praised the film's multiple narrative threads, although he found it "[to lack] the shrewd, self-aware qualities of Van Damme's recent JCVD and Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning".

[20] James Marsh of ScreenAnarchy thought that Enemies Closer did not entirely build upon its "intriguing" premise, due to its more urgent preoccupation with showcasing Van Damme, and a reliance on periodic bouts of exposition-heavy dialogue.

[21] Conversely, Gabe Toro of IndieWire deemed that the subplot involving Scott and Jones did not work, and that the film only found its footing when it focused on the Van Damme character.

[23] Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com judged that the film "does not rise to the level of [the Hyamses]' best work" but noted "at least two setpieces that are keepers".

[23] Toro was particularly effusive, calling Van Damme "an arresting presence in his old age" and his performance "a wonder" which, like his turn in the fourth Universal Soldier film, contained shades of Apocalypse Now's Colonel Kurtz.

[22] Annlee Ellingson of the Los Angeles Times, however, was not impressed with "the eccentricities of Van Damme's character", and did not find them worthy of taking precedence over his martial arts skills.

[25] Pollard wrote that "it's hard to really buy into [him] as an action-type of guy",[23] while Toro found him to have "limited charisma" and criticized his reliance on a stunt double.