Jean-Van Damme is unlikely to get a call from Quentin Tarantino or Spike Jonze any time soon.
So, like any self-respecting can-do action star who conquered Hollywood’s straight to video market armed with no English but some fancy karate, Van Damme has created his own post-modern action movie.
And against the odds the late fortysomething star of such pizza-on-the-lap classics as
Wake of Death,
Maximum Risk and
Sudden Death has pulled it off.
Despite sounding like a mutated variant of a sexually transmitted disease, JCVD is infectious for all the right reasons.
A down on his luck Van Damme journeys back to Belgium in the wake of a messy custody battle to take stock of his failed marriage and sputtering career.
When an ATM refuses to cough up any cash, he unwittingly stumbles into the middle of a robbery. But, due to his personal troubles the police believe he’s done an OJ and held up the bank to meet alimony payments.
As the situation spirals out of control and bullets start flying, a media circus brings world attention to the beleaguered Belgian.
JCVD is indulgent, scattershot and requires prior knowledge of the Van Damme oeuvre – a running joke casts his Hard Target director John Woo in a poor light.
But, rather than a one-note vanity project, this takes ego-free pot-shots at the vagaries of fame (JC loses a lead role because “Steven Seagal agreed to cut off his ponytail”), and turns a standard action movie set-up into a taut hostage thriller, the self-proclaimed “Fred Astaire of karate” barely permitted to bust any moves.
Although it’s likely Jean-Claude himself scaled back the martial arts to prove he can handle a more-or-less straight role, even allowing himself a centrepiece seven minute to-camera monologue.
Self-aggrandising, self-deprecating, part-confessional, this scene veers between laughable and riveting, but the Belgian commands attention throughout.
An impressive opening three minute single-take scene as Jean Claude lays Van Damage on central casting goons should satiate action junkies, and we learn his real name is Van Varenberg.
JCVD is unlikely to win an Oscar, but we say roll on Universal Soldier: The Next Generation (due out 2009/10).
Rob Daniel
