JCVD opens with a flourish: as Curtis Mayfield’s “Hard Times” plays on the soundtrack, we see Jean-Claude Van Damme slowly making his way through some kind of urban battleground, dispatching enemy soldiers with a few swift punches, some well-aimed hand grenades, and a repurposed flamethrower, all in a single unbroken shot that covers what seem like several action-packed city blocks. Sure, it’s obviously just a scene from a movie-within-a-movie, full of faked punches and carefully timed explosions, but that doesn’t make it any less a feat of physical stamina and mental concentration on Van Damme’s part — and you can see the exhaustion on his face when a stupid mistake ruins the entire shot and the director tells him to get ready to do it all over again. “I’m 47 years old,” Van Damme says. “It’s very difficult for me to do everything in one shot.”Jean-Claude Van Damme is 47 years old? Yes he is. He plays himself in JCVD, and while he is still obviously in enviable shape, his body, his career, and his dignity have all taken enough of a battering for the former action movie star and kickboxing champ to resemble Randy “The Ram” Robinson, the broken-down former wrestler Mickey Rourke plays in The Wrestler. Both men found fame under assumed names as invincible fighters; now, in middle age, their real selves are getting harder to deny. They’re both broke but still determined to cling to their former glory — Robinson in grueling fights at neighbourhood halls, Van Damme in cruddy straight-to-DVD action movies. They both have estranged daughters who no longer speak to them too — in a scene from JCVD inspired by his real-life divorce trial, Van Damme’s daughter testifies that she’d rather go live with her mother because her classmates make fun of her whenever he appears on television. He can’t even afford to pay his lawyer; he thought the fee would be covered by his salary for an upcoming movie, but the producers decided to cast Steven Seagal instead when he offered to cut off his ponytail.
But where The Wrestler is a grueling drama modelled on the work of Van Damme’s countrymen the Dardennes brothers, JCVD is a more playfully meta affair. The film begins with Van Damme wandering into the middle of an attempted holdup of a post office, only to have the police erroneously believe he’s the mastermind of the robbery instead of an innocent bystander. Writer/director Mebrouk El Mechri borrows liberally from the Quentin Tarantino playbook, presenting the scenes out of chronological order and allowing the supporting characters to chime in with memorable pieces of pop-culture criticism (as when one of the robbers tells Van Damme that if it weren’t for him, John Woo would still be shooting pigeons in Hong Kong). JCVD is also very much aware of itself as a comeback vehicle for Van Damme, much like Pulp Fiction was for John Travolta.
What’s kind of awesome about JCVD is the way Van Damme refuses to treat the goings-on in this movie as a joke. Which is not to say that he gives a humourless performance (which is what Steven Seagal would doubtlessly have done); there’s a very funny scene, for instance, where he endures the nonstop chatter of a talkative cabbie as he rides home from the airport.
But Van Damme does more than just “poke fun at himself” or “show he’s a good sport” with his performance; it’s as if he realized JCVD was the only chance he’d ever get to tell the world about all the pain and shame and humiliation of being Jean-Claude Van Damme. Late in the film, the action stops dead as Van Damme faces the camera and delivers a long, rambling, tearful, half-improvised monologue about the price of fame, the wreckage of his love life, his drug use, and his belief that he has done absolutely nothing of value in his entire shitty life. Even if it’s occasionally difficult to follow Van Damme’s train of thought, the whole thing is never less than mesmerizing. It’s more than eight minutes long, and he delivers it in a single, unbroken take that covers emotional terrain far more treacherous than anything he faced in that opening action scene.
Jean-Claude Van Damme: great actor? He’s pretty amazing in JCVD, and I hope he takes some comfort in that when he arrived on the set of Universal Soldier III... or watched Mickey Rourke attending the Oscars halfway around the world in Los Angeles.
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