JCVD – The Geekscape Review

When I was a junior in college I wrote a screenplay for a movie with Jean Claude Van Damme in it. It was shortly after his movie Universal Soldier 2: The Return had come out to not so much box office and critical success and all I could think to myself was “this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be”. As an admitted long time fan of Van Damme’s movies, the rapid slipping of one of my favorite action icon’s careers was something that I took personally. I knew that his movies were never award level fare… but as his career at the turn of the century started going the way of straight to video, I found myself a part of a rapidly shrinking group of Jean Claude loyalists. And I was going to do something about it.

The script was terrible. In my post Pulp Fiction, John Woo, Robert Rodriguez loving haze, I thought that there was only one way to really bring Van Damme back: make him kick more ass, harder, for longer. I had it all planned out. He would play the secondary character in the script to someone like, uh, who was hot then? Affleck? Bruce Willis? Yeah. And everything would be going well with the action and the bad guys and everything until BOOM. A-list lead actor gets killed. Hard. Like “that dude is dead and there is no way he is coming back and the bad guys are gonna win” dead. It was a pretty obvious shock. But the bad guys DON’T win. Because Van Damme’s character steps up, does something badass to save the President/Foreign Dignitary/Alien (?) and takes control of the movie. By the time the credits role, any audience that had a brain would be forced to stand up and cheer for their brand new recycled hero. Again, that script was probably one of the worst things ever written.

That can’t be said about JCVD, opening today in New York and making its way across the country in limited engagements. The fictional biopic stars Jean Claude Van Damme as himself and is one of the most interesting movies I’ve seen all year. Directed (and co-written) by French filmmaker Mebrouk El Mechri, JCVD follows a down on his luck (but not humorously so), Jean Claude Van Damme as he comes home to Brussels from Los Angeles to recoup from the wear and tear of being a 47 year old action star and possibly losing his daughter in an expensive custody battle. In order to pay his lawyers to continue the case, he borrows money from a friend. When he steps into a local post office to receive the wire he accidentally becomes a celebrity hostage in an in-progress hold up. For better or worse, this plot line seems like the set up for a pretty high concept action film. I can honestly tell you that it is not in any way.

JCVD is very much a foreign film. There’s no escaping it. If you are hoping for an American friendly narrative or structure, you’ll be fairly disappointed. And if you want high action, you might want to wait for Universal Soldier 3 (which Van Damme has confirmed participation in). This is something different. JCVD a film about a foreign dreamer who came to Hollywood as a young man to pursue his childhood dreams. What he found was a star driven Hollywood system that ended up seducing him and breaking him down over nearly twenty years. The Jean Claude Van Damme that we see in JCVD is a desperate survivor nearing the end of the road, with the only thing he can hold on to is the perception of those around him that he is more than just a regular man. This perception empowers him and becomes his biggest barrier.

The film is told in four parts and is partially out of sequence. We get to the hostage crisis very early and then return to the myriad of events leading up to it. The major players of the hostage stand off are introduced and then we experience the different perspectives through their eyes in various retellings. Again, I can’t stress how different this is to what you might be expecting. Is it bad? No, it’s actually rewarding. It’s refreshing. El Mechri is pretty talented as a storyteller. He presents the movie like a puzzle and asks the viewer to take a look at it from all sides. The one shot intro to the film starts you off with Van Damme as you’ve known him his whole career and then takes that person apart, asking you to look at him in a fresh way. Because of the way that he has repositioned this story and placed someone that we are very familiar with in the middle of it, we are forced to rework our perceptions of him.

Van Damme is great to watch here. He is funny. He is sad. He is very likeable. And he is honest. This is a very accurate depiction of the downward slide of a once respected action star. Where does he go from here? How does he even begin to get that respect back? How does he deal with his public perception as an ex-drug addict or bland actor? I won’t spoil the best parts of the film for you but he completely takes each of these perceptions on headfirst. JCVD is Jean Claude Van Damme putting everything out on the table in front of you and telling you “this is what happened. This is how things got this way. And now I’m stuck.” So how is he going to get out? How will he persevere? WILL he persevere? These are the themes running through the movie. Have you caught on to the fitting symbolism of the hostage crisis?

The film’s pacing does stretch in a few places. When you are accustomed to seeing this guy kicking ass and busting heads, it sometimes becomes difficult to watch him helpless with a gun to his head. But this is part of the stripping away that JCVD does so well. It takes familiar pieces and rearranges them for you to put back together. There are portions of the film where you will have to sit and watch patiently for things to fit into place. But the rewards are there if you wait and look for them, especially in a scene about 3/4s of the way through the film. I had read about the scene in earlier reports about the movie and I have to say that it didn’t disappoint. Try not to roll your eyes, but Van Damme’s monologue to the audience in this movie is one of my favorite performance scenes in a movie. It stuck with me for the rest of the day and is the turning point in the film where everything is laid out in front of you. He doesn’t pull any stops and you’ll be pretty surprised that the guy who delivered all of those flat one-liners while he was spin-kicking bad guys can deliver a performance on this level.

So it turns out that I don’t have to brush off my terrible script now. With this film, Jean Claude Van Damme has succeeded in reinventing himself, but he’s done it in an unexpected way. Again, I can’t stress how different this movie is to the Van Damme stuff that we are used to. If you go in wanting that kind of a film you are going to be extremely disappointed. This is a European film that will appeal to more of an art house audience. It might end up being too much of a strange dichotomy to appeal to much of anybody. But it’s also the most interesting and successful experiment that I have seen this year and it rewards you for your open-mindedness. It really turned me on my ear as a fan and I can’t think of a better reward for my years of loyal fandom than to see Jean Claude Van Damme reinvent himself in this way. I’m excited to see it again.

JCVD opens tonight in New York City. For a screening schedule and full list of locations, check out the film’s official website.