JCVD - Jean-Claude Van Damme's Comeback Film
Aging Action Film Icon Shines in Mabrouk El Mechri's New Film
Nov 13, 2008
Brazilian born French director Mabrouk El Mechri's meta-movie serenade to the tragedies of fame and misfortune is both an unabashed celebration of its fallen idol's persona and at the same time a calculated deconstruction of it.
With the cinematic swagger of Guy Ritchie with the visceral punch of Tony Scott, Mechri film first hooks up with the Muscles from Brussels hard at work on the set of his latest movie. We watch as he smashes his way through a horde of hilariously expendable goons wielding swords and flamethrowers in a scene so needlessly complicated it would embarrass Orsen Welles. When it's over, an exhausted Van Damme pleads with his director (who couldn't care less) that he's not the spring chicken he once was and could they maybe tone it down a bit?
From there it's a quick trip to a custody hearing where he holds his head in his hands as his ex-wife's attorney lambastes his movies as a bad influence while he rightly argues that it's those movies that pay the bills. His words fall on deaf ears as his young daughter takes the stand and asks not to live with daddy - because the kids at school make fun of her whenever he is on the TV.
Van Damme Day Afternoon
Broke and broken, Van Damme returns to Brussels having lost his latest direct-to-video paycheck (to Steven Segal no less!). Once there, his attorney calls him to say his check bounced and unless he receives immediate payment he is dropping the custody case. Desperate, Van Damme darts into a post office that unbeknownst to him is in the midst of a robbery. Based on nothing but his take-charge screen persona, the police simply assume that he is the masterminded behind it.
In fact, a terrified teller tried to get rid of him by telling him that they have no cash left, and he somewhat pathetically begged her to ask the rest of the staff if between them they could personally loan him $600. It's at this moment that you begin to realize that while there is some great comedy here (the cab driver tears Van Damme a new one because he isn't as nice as she always imagined he would be), this story reeks of incidental despair and rage at a life he no longer has any control over.
All Van Damme wants is someone to cut him a break. And a role, any role, in a serious movie. Instead what he finds are people wanting to snap a picture with him, ask him to do the cigarette trick (wait and see), and slag off John Woo for using him as a ticket to Hollywood and then dropping him like a rock. Like a Belgian Dog Day Afternoon the crowds and the media circus duly assemble outside the post office with banners and t-shirts not for the man but just to bask in the glow of novelty and cheer on the ass-kicker from the TV they think they know.
Everything we know is wrong
It all really just wouldn't work if not for the complicity that you yourself as a viewer unknowingly play in the manufactured image he can never escape. As Van Damme pleads with this group of heavily armed men to end this madness, you question why he doesn't just kick the crap out of them and save the day.
Seemingly at rock bottom, Van Damme turns to the camera and addresses the audience directly as he slowly begins to weep. In a shockingly tender monologue that will forever shatter your preconceptions of the man, he simply lays it all out on the table. How he's ashamed that after twenty years of karate he sold out his warrior code, the only thing he ever held true, for an easy paycheck. He is sorry for his drug problems. For his failed marriages and his troubled children. He is sorry for his inability to express what he now believes is the case; that he spent his whole life chasing the dreams of a scrawny immigrant kid - and he sincerely hopes that he doesn't die in this post office, because his whole life to this point amounts to nothing.
It's this masterful melding of stone cold self-awareness spliced with such utter flights of fantasy that steer JCVD away from the dead end avenues of self-pity and onto the superhighway of sheer movie magic.
