JCVD
'JCVD" may not be the first meta-musclehead movie, but it's certainly the most surprising. Of all the rippled hunks bone-breaking their way through the last 20 years of action films, Jean-Claude Van Damme would seem to be the least self-aware. A bantam fighting cock, "The Muscles From Brussels" has postured, preened, and kickboxed his way through 30-plus movies, almost all of them dreadful. Never has he intimated he can act; never has he hinted that he's even in on the joke.
Until now. "JCVD" is what you might get if a French deconstructionist decided to make a drive-in flick: It reverse engineers the mayhem until it locates the humor, the sadness, and the insecure void at the heart of the genre. Above all, the film allows Jean-Claude Van Damme to play what may be his greatest role, that of a faded action-movie star named Jean-Claude Van Damme.
He's surprisingly good at it.
"JCVD" starts off with a bang: a four-minute tracking shot that follows the star as he's filming an absurdly overheated battle scene - Get the Uzi! Grab the machete! Toss the grenade! Set that extra on fire! - before ending with the perfect Murphy's Law capper. Maybe director/co-writer Mabrouk El Machri is proving his movie-geek bona fides ("Touch of Evil" reference, check), but he quickly downshifts, showing Van Damme sitting in court, sighing as his ex-wife's lawyer proves the star's unfitness for child custody by reeling off the methods in which he has dispatched onscreen villains over the years.
Cut to Brussels, where a disconsolate Van Damme drops into a bank branch office to make a withdrawal and is caught up in a real-life robbery. Outside in the street, the cops, the hostage negotiator (François Damiens), and the growing throngs are convinced the star has popped a screw and gone outlaw. Inside, the robbers can't believe their luck. The sadistic gang leader schemes how best to use their A-list hostage, while the inside man - a true fan - just wants Jean-Claude to demonstrate his high kick.
"JCVD" walks a tightrope of knowing parody, earning laughs from the inherent cognitive dissonance involved in movie stardom. Everyone keeps remarking that Van Damme's shorter than they expected; the locals criticize him in theory then turn into fawning idolators as soon as he's right there in front of them. The star, aware that he's reached his sell-by date, crumples with despair when he hears that Steven Seagal has cut off his ponytail to win a role they both coveted.
At its heart, the movie's interested in the tension someone like Van Damme has to maintain between his Iron Man aura and being a regular guy - between choosing movies or life. In the most jaw-droppingly surreal sequence in "JCVD," the star literally ascends to the heavens and addresses the camera in a long, agonized monologue about the vicissitudes of fame. So he was a 90-pound teenage weakling named Jean-Claude Von Varenberg who dreamed of stardom and attained it; was that so wrong? "It's hard for people not to judge me," he concludes tearily. "Easier to blame me."
This is a bravura scene and Van Damme rises to its emotional challenge, but to be honest, the monologue doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Filmed through an occasionally off-putting filter of golds and greens, "JCVD" is more a prankish doctoral thesis than a movie, with smart ideas rolling around in a structure that hasn't been fully thought out. El Machri has great fun playing head games with the conceptual divide between life and the movies (why does that bank branch look so much like a set?) and our love/hate affair with celebrities, but the film's not grounded by anything other than its beefcake existential antihero.
Maybe that's enough, though. Van Damme's weary, sorrowful gaze manages to be both ridiculous and moving here; suddenly he's a figure out of Fellini or Buñuel - a man who has convinced everyone but himself that he's a cartoon of invincible strength. For a guy who once starred in "Kickboxer 2: The Road Back," "JCVD" represents not a return but a renewal.
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