Film Review: JCVD, A Brechtian Van Damme Action Movie
by Vic Neptune
Out of curiosity a month ago I watched a film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, “the muscles from Brussels.” I had never seen anything starring the Belgian action star. The film, Pound of Flesh (2015) opens with Van Damme lying in a bathtub, ice floating around him. He wakes up, disoriented. Slowly and with great pain he gets out of the tub, seeing in a mirror that he has a long scar on his back. A kidney is missing. Someone the night before slipped him a mickey, a doctor performed an operation, money was left for him so the perpetrators can pass their crime off as a mutual understanding between doctor and donor.
He proceeds to get that kidney back, desperate because he meant the organ for his niece, who needs it and will die in a few months without it. This somewhat wild premise kept me interested throughout, mainly because of Van Damme, a movie star with strong charisma and hard to ignore screen presence. I watched more of his films, mainly finding them on YouTube. Some were so-so experiences, but a few, like Timecop, Universal Soldier, and Black Water, were compelling and exciting to watch.
None of these films prepared me for JCVD (2008), directed by Mabrouk El Mechri. The film begins with a single camera tracking shot going on for several minutes, covering a huge stretch of ground while guns fire, hand grenades explode, and men dressed as soldiers go down under Jean-Claude Van Damme’s fists and feet. He flings men, decks some to the pavement, and helps a woman along, protecting her all the while, stopping short of a man with a flamethrower, taking him down, and then on to a wall with a door. The wall drops from the clumsy motion of a crew member, ruining the long take. Cut to the director, a young man tossing darts at his video monitor, bored and exasperated, apparently, looking at what could be a scene they’ve tried to get right more than once and maybe quite a few times.
The opener of JCVD shows the working life of the action star, while the remainder of the movie concentrates on his life as himself, although the situation in the movie (a bank robbery and hostage situation with Van Damme caught up in the mess) is a fictional scenario with Van Damme playing himself, though as a hostage of a group of robbers whose plan has gone awry.
The problem seems to be one of timing--the robbers came along when the bank didn’t have cash on hand. Van Damme, having flown into his home city of Brussels, needs some cash. He enters the bank, innocent of knowing anything is amiss, soon finding himself a hostage along with a dozen or so others– employees and hapless customers. The movie star is thus put into a position of being like the unknowns, guns pointed at him, but his situation differs due to his stardom. One of the robbers, clearly a fan, treats him well to the end.
Van Damme, forced by the robbers to say to the police on the phone that he’s the apparent authority among the criminals, becomes regarded as the main guy doing the bank job. It’s absurd, but it’s also what the cops have to go on. Crowds form on the streets, some holding signs saying “I [heart] J.C.” All through the film, with Van Damme’s self-deprecating, movingly human behavior and performance, we see a side of him as a real person. He is not the action man depicted in his movies. In flashbacks, his custody battle for his daughter shows him as an agonized parent dealing with that stress. His career isn’t working well for him, either. He loses a role to Steven Seagal, who had “promised to cut off his ponytail,” and thus was awarded the part.
In the film’s most remarkable scene, Van Damme, in his chair in the bank, rises to near the ceiling where there’s a movie studio light behind him, displaying the film’s Brechtian fourth wall breakage artifice. From this vantage point he delivers an emotionally powerful monologue about his life; about how he made himself into what we see, starting as a skinny kid who learned karate and worked at that for years, getting into films and finding success, with money and
the glory of all that on the side. Still, he admits that he sees so many people who deserve success more but don’t have it. He admits his past drug use and succumbing to the goodies associated with stardom. His story, typical of so many who achieve fame, is made atypical in this peculiar film because it isn’t often that someone in his profession reveals such a raw and open confession.
JCVD probably isn’t an initial Van Damme film to watch for anyone unfamiliar with his extensive film work. After I’d seen ten or so of his films, however, I found JCVD lined up perfectly for my appreciation. It may be in a category by itself: an abstract experimental action movie.
Vic Neptune writes, makes movies (YouTube Channel John Berner), collages, painting. Moves made as Rhombus. Film criticism based on thousands of movies of all eras seen. Strong interest in literature: Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, Jack London, Robert Howard, Joan Didion, Philip K. Dick, and many others. History and religion other interests also. Favorite filmmakers: Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasonlini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Federico Fellini. Life without art is art without life.
