JCVD (2/5)
Posted on 28 Mar 2009
Guest reviewer and conceptual designer of this particular double feature (JCVD & Eagle Eye), Mr. Chad Brian:
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Riding the swell of the biggest hit of his career, “Timecop”, Jean Claude Van Damme gave an interview to Movieline magazine claiming he was just one movie away from being as big a star as Stallone or Schwarzenegger. The movie, he went on to explain, would have to be slick, a lot of smoke, some comedy, some action, team him with a strong female lead “because I have so much appeal with the ladies”. And boom, it’s Jean Claude’s “Oceans 11” or something like that. One would question his appeal to the ladies as I can’t imagine many women were doing a double feature of “Death Warrant” along side “Beaches”. The interview was a great look into the hubris that was Van Damme at the time. A raging drug addict with a goofy accent making a steady stream of B-movies should have no problem becoming a huge star. Right? Land of dreams of all.
So it’s with the hindsight of Van Damme’s failed supernova we come to “JCVD”, a mash up of “Being John Malkovich” and “The Last Action Hero”, where the more-human-than-human Jean Claude stars as himself, hard up, shooting movies for indifferent wunderkinds from Asia and losing his kid in a custody battle and oh, by-the-way, he’s broke. In a ‘shit rolls downhill’ moment he ends up part of a bank robbery where the police and media believe The Claude is the one robbing the bank and not the actual sub-Dog Day Afternoon robbers. I never quite got what the film makers were going for here. That action film stars are actually human and bleed and cry just like us? That we build up stars just to tear them down? Is this news? The centerpiece of the film is when the ‘story’ actually stops for a couple minutes so Van Damme can give us a teary, self-indulgent monologue about how he just wanted to entertain us and he wishes everyone in the world had money or something. Very meta, but to what purpose? If his early films were sound and fury signifying nothing, at least they had the sound and fury. This film just has the nothingness.
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