Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
11/23/08
Since
I first saw Universal Soldier back in 1992, I have held yet another
of my extreme minority opinions: Jean-Claude Van Damme, the kickboxing
action star nicknamed “The Muscles from Brussels” has real acting chops.
His heyday was brief, but in a period between the summers of '92 through
'96, the former karate champion gave great performances in Soldier,
Nowhere to Run, Timecop and Sudden Death, along with
solid star turns in The Quest, Hard Target and the underrated
camp gem Street Fighter. What made him special was an emotional
accessibility you'd never get from his contemporaries like Steven Segal
or Dolph Lundgren. From there, bad career choices like co-starring
with Dennis Rodman in Double Team and a real-life cocaine habit
conspired to drop him into the direct-to-video dustbin with shocking speed.
But now, over a decade later, the inspired French thriller JCVD
hands the 48 year-old the role of the lifetime: himself.
Jean-Claude
Van Damme is at the end of his rope. Stumbling off the set of another
direct-to-video turkey, he's fighting a losing battle for custody of his
daughter (Saskia Flanders) complicated by the fact that his check to his
attorney (Alan Rossett) just bounced. Despairing, but still a weary
good sport when approached by fans in the street, he returns home to Belgium,
where he makes a desperate deal to star in a sequel to one of his awful
recent films in exchange for a wire transfer that will cover his debt to
the lawyers before they drop his case. But something strange is happening
at the post office he enters to pick up that transfer. Before long,
it's surrounded by cops led by Commissioner Bruges (Francois Damiens) who
believe that the man who's taken over the building and is holding all its'
occupants hostage... is Jean-Claude Van Damme.
JCVD
tells a fairly simple story through a complex series of interlocking, out-of-sequence
scenes designed to allow you to see the story from the points of view of
the different players involved. Obviously, the Muscles from Brussels
is not trying to rob the post office, but instead he's found himself in
the middle of the kind of situation his movie characters would immediately
put to rest with a few well-placed kicks. We've seen actors play
themselves in the middle of genre-style situations before, but never with
quite this level of brutal honesty. To say JCVD is a warts-and-all
portrait is quite an understatement: if someone else were playing
the lead role, it might even be considered a hatchet job. But there's
something quite remarkable about the fearlessness with which the star faces
the third act of his career, particularly in an amazing monologue in which
he drifts above the action up into the rafters where it's clear all below
him is simply a movie set to try to explain the choices that he's made
and the consequences he must live with. “I don't know how to judge
people, and it's hard for people not to judge me,” he says, writing a fit
epitaph for many a showbiz career. Van Damme, the character and presumably
the actor as well, is just looking for a second chance. He tells
us with unflinching honesty that he blew the first one, but this raw, accessible
performance is a perfect statement that he's got something left in the
tank that has nothing to do with kicking a cigarette out of a man's mouth.
Writer/director
Mabrouk El Mechri is not afraid to rub the star's nose in his failures,
using footage of the kind of weird, rambling interviews that helped to
brand him as a flake and to re-enact a losing real-life custody battle
(albeit with the gender of the child switched). Van Damme rages to
his agent (Jesse Joe Walsh) on the phone about the economics of low-budget
productions that sink virtually their entire budget on his presence leaving
him to “run around in a warehouse” when he'd gladly work for free for another
shot in a major studio movie. And what the movie imagines as a happy
ending of sorts is quite audacious. El Mechri also plays some interesting
games with the strange nature of celebrity. Although Van Damme no
longer enjoys any of the fruits of his fame, he's still left to “play the
movie star” everywhere he goes, posing for pictures and being lectured
for not living up to his on-screen image. And one man inside the
post office (Zinedine Soualem) is bizarrely willing to drop let all the
life and death details of what's happening around him leave his mind when
he has a chance to talk shop with a real-life movie star.
JCVD's
plot is a bit thin to sustain 96 minutes, the climax is sorta random, and
the cinematography's washed-out look is a very poor match with the white
subtitles chosen to underscore its' French-language dialog (about 2/3 of
the movie is subtitled, presumably by someone who doesn't know how to turn
a translated phrase). Good supporting performances come from Soualem,
Damiens (it's a hoot how Bruges, in the middle of a “celebrity” case, lets
no opportunity to identify himself by name go untapped) and Balkhadra,
as the only one of the real criminals who'd make the cinematic JCVD bat
an eye. And it's quite shocking when the police bring Van Damme's
parents (played by Liliane Baker and Francois Beukelares) to try to talk
their son down.
But
JCVD's interest rarely leaves its' star, and rightly so. The
movie is a fascinating deconstruction of the pitfalls of fame in general
and his in particular. You'd be hard-pressed to find a man more willing
to turn his own life into that one more great role than Jean-Claude Van
Damme, maybe enough so to even kick-start a comeback. I always knew
he had it in him. |
