JCVD

What’s it about?
In a plot seemingly constructed in a Belgian movie laboratory for the sole purpose of getting me to watch it, Jean-Claude Van Damme (playing himself, sort of) finds himself embroiled in a bank-heist hostage situation while depressingly contemplating his failed career.

Any chicks in the movie?
Nobody of consequence.

Awesomeness Factor?
You know those dancing bears in the circus? They ride around on unicycles, dressed in hilariously emasculating clown costumes, and you feel kinda sorry for the bear but at the same time you’re all like “Dude! That bear is totally riding a unicycle! How awesome is that?” It’s not the quality of the riding that’s important, but rather that the bear can ride at all.  In JCVD, the bear is Jean-Claude Van Damme*, and the unicycle is his freshly discovered ability to act, made even more shocking because he’s starred in approximately one squintillion direct-to-DVD movies before this. The conceit here is Jean-Claude is playing himself, or at least some particularly depressing version of himself – a once-celebrated action star who’s ego and drug problems have dragged him down to the sub-Steven Seagal level of the action movie ladder. JCVD kicks off with a brazenly awesome one-take action sequence where the Muscles From Brussels takes down what appears to be the entire German eastern front, but you can’t stop yourself from noticing his slow, methodical movements and his sloppy, over-reacting opponents. Jean-Claude is no Tony Jaa, and the action movie world has moved on without him. From there, Van Damme gives us an incredibly self-loathing peek into his life: he’s broke, he’s old, he’s fighting for custody of his daughter, and while he’s still a national icon in Belgium he’s nothing more than an 80s punchline to the rest of the world. JCVD tricks you in those first ten minutes or so into thinking it’s going to be the Charlie Kaufman version of an action movie, but sadly once the actual plot starts it slides into a sub-par hostage thriller played mostly straight. Annoyingly, the director really, really, really wants to make Pulp Fiction*, so he cuts up the narrative of this story into a pointlessly tricky flashback-and-forward structure in the mistaken belief that a non-sequential structure must somehow equal art. (There’s a nice bit of side business with one of the bank robbers who just happens to be a massive Van Damme fan as he talks Jean-Claude’s ear off about how John Woo screwed his career after Hard Target.) But wait, that bear’s got one more trick up it’s clown sleeve, which comes in the form of a show-stopping monologue delivered straight to the camera near the end, where Van Damme essentially apologises to his fans for being such a fuckup. It stops the movie dead of course because there’s no way it can recover, but to call it surprising doesn’t even begin to address how utterly fuck-boggled I was watching it. It’s like the bear stopped riding the unicycle and instead performed a soliloquy from Richard III and then lit himself on fire.

Mitigated By?
I wish I could recommend this to normal people, but the truth is there’s about fifteen minutes of awesome wrapped around a mediocre flick. On the other hand, if you’ve seen Bloodsport more than once all the way through on purpose, then this is an absolutely essential rental. Dude really hates John Woo, though.

* Surprise!

** To the point where he rips off Pulp Fiction’s title font for the end credits. Those cheeky Belgians.