In Film: Jean-Claude Can Act?

Jean-Claude Van Damme is an enigma. No, a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Cause in the Ninjas vs. Pirates debate, Van Damme would be like the ninja who drunkenly swaggers over and kills the moderator with a silent kick to the groin – a ninja-pirate hybrid if you will. And even more amazingly, he’s kind of Belgian, which is a type of French. In fact, he and I have something in common: We both learned English around the same time, and our first American movie was Bloodsport —though you can guess which side of screen I was on. And watching Van Damme kick ass taught me this: no one kicks ass like the French.

And then I grew up and learned a thing or two.

And, so, apparently did Van Damme.

So now he’s making his come-back. JCVD is a foreign indie that has got just about everything an American mainstream needs: comedy, violence, melodrama. There’s no gratuitous sex, but we are treated to a bit of mind-fuckery with French pseudo-intellectualism that is meta-fiction. Our biopic’s titular character is played by none other than JCVD himself.

An aging, dejected Van Damme sits in Family Court. He listens to his ex-wife’s lawyer condemn his parenting, capping off each jab with the emphatic drop of ultraviolent B-movies as they form a pile on the exhibits desk. Exhibit D: Fourth crap movie in two years makes Jean-Claude a shitty parent. The logic here is not so great (French legal consultants maybe?) but JCVD’s daughter gets it. She decides to go live with mum because dad’s just too, well, embarrassing. The consummate fan within me weeps, “Jean-Claude, what happened to you? What happened?”

JCVD asks the same as it carries us through a few “what if” scenarios. What if Van Damme went back to Brussels, to recuperate let’s say, hopped into a bank, and found himself among the hostages in a robbery? What if the robbers decided to capitalize on Van Damme’s fame – and recent money troubles – to trick the cops outside into thinking that JCVD was the mastermind of said robbery?

As we watch the Muscles from Brussels struggle with a not-so-interesting ontological quandary (Is he a human being? Is he superstar? Can one be both?), he sneaks up on us with a surprising revelation: Van Damme can act!

About midway through the climax, Van Damme ascends to the ceiling and lapses into Shakespearean soliloquy. He whispers, struggles in part-French, part-English slang as he expounds on what it means to lose your identity to fame and money – to bleach yourself a dry, empty, Hollywood trademark. And, finally, he cries, “Je ne suis pas un animal! Je suis un être humain!”

Very good, but cameras don’t talk back!

Holding a lens to our image-obsessed culture, JCVD casts harsh light on the delusion of self-branding as predetermination. Jean-Claude is not at all what he seems. He’s not a superhero and, despite such wisdom as “one plus one is sometimes eleven” and “be aware,” he’s not even a philosopher. Indeed, only when he throws off his pseudo-philosophical bullshit and finally owns up to what he is (a failed has-been) does he regain a modicum of self respect and, ostensibly, the possibility of future success.

In his transatlantic debut, Director Mabrouk El Mechri blends the touching and the gritty. Grainy filters, artistic camera angles, and understated humor produces something between a British heist and a redemption flick (think Snatch meets The Verdict). Of course, Mechri’s greatest accomplishment is the surgical precision with which he unravels our hero’s layers and exposes the raw, human underbelly of a man we’ve only so far known through tabloids and internet memes.

JCVD expunges the life of a human brand, and then rebrands its hero once again. Even the film’s villains – only one of whom is really evil – stand in awe of the superstar in their midst, half hoping, half expecting that he’ll bust out with the fabled moves and do something cool. And Van Damme delivers. He shows us that among the jeered at has-beens, true heroes can still redeem their childhood fans.

4/5 stars