Jean-Claude Van Damned

Jean-Claude Van Damme. Part of the 80's Rat Pack of muscle-bound action stars in cheesy, fun action movies with company such as Stallone, Schwartzenegger, Seagel, Norris, and Willis. My earliest memories are watching Kickboxer, where Van Damme is training in some tropical wilderness, his shirt off, tan, muscles exposed, with lots and lots of karate. I wanted to be like him. Bloodsport got his career into high gear and he was soon one of the most sought after action stars of the 80's and early 90's. His signature spinning, round-house kick delivered as the end-all knock-out hit near the end of his fights was enough to make me clench my fists with adrenaline. But something happened.

Somewhere around the mid-90's, his career started hitting some snags. His movies began to make less and less money. At least his movies were still hitting the theater. But as movie producers started noticing the trends, they realized Van Damme wasn't a good investment anymore. Suddenly a barrage of straight-to-video films swept through Blockbuster. He became a joke. Anytime you saw him in one of these later films, you could never take him seriously. Not only was there every action movie cliche, but there was every Van Damme cliche. Overblown plots, terrible scripts, long stretches of boring scene development, and an inability to take his acting any more seriously than a Hulk Hogan or an Ernest movie. How could such a titan of action-movie superstardom become a dive, almost a comic figure in a tragedy, becoming the butt of any joke having to do with ruined careers and trainwrecks?

Now I don't know much about Van Damme's personal life, but this downward spiral in movie output is almost entirely a reflection of it. He had everything. He was a modern day Solomon, having many wives, had sex with countless women, became entangled in a destructive drug habit, struggling with his financies, losing custody of his children, all with full cognizance if his career's momentum as becoming a joke. He was unraveling. He tried everything the world had to offer and saw that it was nothing but a chasing after the wind. Out of nowhere, he had somewhat of a spiritual reawakening. I don't know the details, but somewhere, somehow, he came to see the futility of living out an existence based on mere pleasure. It is so strange to realize that the hammiest actor you know, from the lead to the background characters, to the guy responsible for the lighting that Christian Bale exploded on, are real, rich, full, beautiful, drama-filled lives that, if thier lives were a movie, would all be worthy of an Academy Award.



Enter a very strange movie called JCVD (2008), which stands for Jean-Claude Van Damme. It is a foreign film and the characters speak in French. He plays himself and consciously puts emphasis on real aspects of his life: his financial struggles, his family issues, his personal demons. The plot is mundane and more a vehicle for Van Damme to play a Hamlet than be delightful in its own right. After we see him in his struggles, he is at a bank where he realizes he has no money. Just then, a robber knocks him out, but due to some communication problem, the police think Van Damme robbed the bank and is now holding everyone who was present hostage. He uses this time to tell those present about his real life apart from his celebrity status.



Against all odds, he gives a very powerful peformance, with critics agreeing. The foreign-film status gives it a more realistic feel and you don't have to hear Van Damme trip over the English language. And since he is playing himself and not a character, his performance has an effortlessness about it that is refreshing. In all his other films, I almost feel my stomach tie in knots because all I can think about is some foreign actor playing a cheesy action role and it distracts from the character and the story. JCVD solves both these problems. There are pathos-filled scenes, like a court scene in which Van Damme is losing custody of his daughter mainly because his daughter is teased at school when one of his films is on at her school. Touches like those are perfect because they touch on something everyone is feeling. He becomes his own worst critic and his criticisms are noteworthy. He takes aim at not just his movies but his self. Give it a view.