Remember the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle “Double Impact”? No? That was the one with “The Muscles from Brussels” as long-lost twin brothers who team up to scissor-kick the evildoers.
If the idea of two Van Dammes isn’t mind-bending enough, try “JCVD,” a critically heralded movie that puts the actor’s persona through a blender.
Van Damme plays Jean-Claude Van Damme, the famous martial-arts star. Whether this corresponds to the real JCVD is the movie’s hook, but we’ll go with the premise.
Back in Belgium to deal with a child-custody case, nearing 50, and tired of making lousy movies like, well, “Double Impact,” Van Damme finds himself in the middle of a real-life robbery and hostage situation.
For a while, the cops think Van Damme is the perpetrator, a point that greatly troubles his parents. The film nimbly goes back and forth in time to cover this situation.
After a while you realize that director Mabrouk El Mechri isn’t interested in an action flick. This is a character study of an imaginary JCVD, a world-weary and self-aware movie star whose best days are over.
It comes to a head in a long climactic monologue, shot in one take, as Van Damme delivers an epic confession. In many ways, it’s just as impressive as his expert martial-arts moves.
Along with its jumbled chronology, the film is presented in a brownish glaze, which I suppose signals its art-movie aspirations, just in case anybody stumbled in expecting a customary Van Damme chopfest.
As has often been the case in his normal movies, Van Damme seems somehow in on his own joke. The film takes stabs at his rival, Steven Seagal, who is rumored to be cutting off his ponytail, and at director John Woo, whose American break was a Van Damme picture.
I’m not entirely sure how successful all this is, but it’s certainly one of the most unusual ideas for a movie this year. And it’s impossible to see Jean-Claude Van Damme in quite the same way again — but I still refuse to revisit “Double Impact.”
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