Guest post by Gillian of FilmFemme.com
Kicking Ass and Taking Names: Van Damme Double Feature at the New Beverly
At the New Beverly theatre just west of La Brea, where you’ll usually find a smattering of film buffs spending a night with pristine prints of obscure thrillers or screwball comedies, where the question “why is the floor so sticky?” is better left unasked and where “sausagefest” is a polite way to describe the m/f ratio, last night you could really feel the love for the Muscles from Brussels. It was here that, alongside 50 or so other fans of kitsch, camp and kicking ass, I watched JCVD, French writer/director Mabrouk el Mechri’s valentine to Jean Claude Van Damme. Though I wouldn’t venture to describe it as a masterpiece, it was one of the more entertaining films I’ve seen in the past year. Van Damme plays himself, an aged action star, embattled in a child custody dispute, broke, returning to his hometown to piece his life back together when he gets caught up in a plot to rob a post office. With enough hat-tipping allusions to tickle cinephiles and a self-aware humor that extends to tragically funny, JCVD is what post-modernism is all about. Van Damme turns in a surprisingly sympathetic performance with a wry cynicism that made me draw favorable comparisons Mickey Rourke’s awards-grabbing turn in The Wrestler. No, really.
After a palatte cleansing 30 minutes of Van Damme trailers (voiceover guys used to get a lot of work from this genre!), the second film of the program was Double Impact. That’s right, two Van Dammes for the price of one. Or, three if you want to count the first movie, too. Double Impact is definitely canon for Van Damme and though it lacks the self-reflection of JCVD, it is uproarious in an entirely different way. Separated at birth, Alex and Chad are reunited at age 25 in Hong Kong and must fight a scary Chinese gang and an evil rich guy to regain their birthright which is a tunnel that their dead father built to connect Hong Kong with mainland China. Yeah, I don’t really get it either, but the plot is beside the point. It’s TWO Van Dammes! And one lives in Los Angeles and wears shorts while the other lives in Hong Kong and wears hair gel! If you think this device to be a little self-indulgent, look no further than the screenplay credits: that’s right, Van Damme himself along with director Sheldon Lettich were responsible for this masterwork. The only disappointing part in my estimation was that there were too many guns and not enough badass martial arts. I guess by 1991 people had tired of Kickboxer-style fights and longed to see more explosions and gunplay, but I personally think most movies could stand a few more people getting kicked in the face. It definitely would have helped Revolutionary Road…
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