- Jean-Claude Van Damme IS Jean-Claude Van Damme IN JCVD. It's enough to pique the interest of even the most casual fan of cheesy martial arts movies. The film's opening is equally promising as, after the production company's usual logo is modified to include some karate, we are treated to nearly five straight minutes of JCVD kicking various forms of ass. Criminals take note: knives, guns, and even flamethrowers are of no avail. But that is the movie within the movie -- the real JCVD is a much less exciting subject.
- The real Van Damme, a.k.a. Jean-Claude Van Vaerenbergh, is a man who struggles with a dual identity. On one hand, he is the universally recognized action star who, particularly on the streets of Brussels, faces a constant barrage of requests for autographs and karate demonstrations. But Van Damme is paradoxically also a struggling actor whose desperate financial situation and ongoing custody battle force him to accept low-profile acting gigs. In what we assume is a typical day, he flies back from a hearing in California only to find that Steven Seagal got the part, probably because he promised to cut his ponytail. Just when it seems like things couldn't get any worse, Van Damme stumbles into a post office hostage situation that could have come from one (or perhaps all?) of his movies. Will the action hero emerge or is JCVD really just a tired, washed-up actor?
- Predictably, the real answer falls somewhere in between the two extremes. As a hostage, Van Damme is exceptionally restrained, preferring to negotiate with words rather than roundhouse kicks. While this is conceptually novel, it also accidentally illustrates the fact that our supposed hero cuts a much less interesting figure when he's not kicking people. Unfortunately, this devotion to realism doesn't extend to the entirety of the film, which, in addition to its gratuitous use of sepia tones, eventually permits such meta-devices as a bizarre stagelit emotional soliloquy and multiple endings. Whatever the film's intended point, the message I got was that there are good reasons that Van Damme is known as the "Muscles from Brussels" and not the "Introspective Indie Hero from Brussels."
