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Jean-Claude Van Damme: Last action hero
Once the laughing stock of the movie world, Jean-Claude Van Damme, who made a living kicking ass and speaking broken English in late-eighties and early-nineties action films, seemed to disappear from the public consciousness. Until now.
He returns to screens at this year’s Fantastic Fest in ‘JCVD,’ a film in which he plays a washed-up 47 year-old action hero struggling through action scenes and enduring even more abuse in a custody battle for his child. Sound familiar?
The movie begins with the chiseled but aging Van Damme struggling to make his one through an over-the-top action scene — in which he dismantles seemingly an entire army of ‘bad guys’ — that is filmed in one long-running shot. The director is a young Asian seemingly full of ennui and antipathy toward Hollywood. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. But such is life when you have legal bills to pay.
The film follows Van Damme in a series of flashbacks from his family court battle in L.A. to an outlandish scenario in which he finds himself as a hostage in a post office in his home town in Belgium. In both the filmmaking and the storytelling the violent comedy shows serious influences of Guy Ritchie, Simon Pegg, the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino. It is an absurd, highly stylized shaggy dog story but also touching in its portrayal of a man who has become a prisoner of his own fame and a forgotten punch line in Hollywood, forced to sell out his body and his creative vision in order to work. Where reality begins and ends is hard to tell in this film, but it does a good job of reveling the human side of the thoughtful karate master in an entertaining and meta screenplay.
Apparently it humanized and highlighted Van Damme, who displayed some pretty decent dramatic acting chops in the film, to the point that since the film first screened at a festival earlier this year, he has started to receive more acting work, and is currently working on a project in which he is starring and directing. Only in America. Or Belgium. Or whatever.
‘JCVD’ screens tonight at Alamo South as part of the Fantastic Fest.
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