2008's Powerful and Darkly Funny JCVD Proved that Jean-Claude Van Damme Could Act. Who knew?
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I am in the perfect place to re-watch and write about the 2008 action-comedy-psychodrama JCVD. It’s hitting all my sweet spots these days. I am, after all, very deep into the process of writing a mammoth book about movies about making movies, The Fractured Mirror. I just completed the 168th piece for the book, on the little loved 2016 animated dark comedy Nerdland.
I am even deeper into the process of watching ALL of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta’s movies for The Travolta/Cage Project and the Travolta/Cage podcast and one of Cage’s most important and delightful late-period vehicle is this year’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
Cage’s well-received comeback comedy is very overtly “JCVD but with Nicolas Cage.” That turns out to be such a winning recipe that Cage’s movie is better than its inspiration because its star is better than Van Damme as an actor if not as a martial artist.
I say that as a big fan of Van Damme and someone who has had the privilege of revisiting many of his most iconic, weird and interesting movies for one very generous, very appreciated patron.
This trip back through Van Damme’s golden-era filmography has given me a new appreciation for his gifts, chief among them his extraordinary beauty. Van Damme has long reigned as the most beautiful man in action, if not movies as a whole.
I never tire of looking at his face or his body. One of JCVD’s great strengths is that it empowers Van Damme to play someone his own age, someone with wrinkles and leathery skin and baggage of all variety, someone who bears the scars of rejection, addiction and depression.
Van Damme is exhausted on an existential level in JCVD. Fame has given him everything and taken everything. It made Van Damme an international celebrity and a joke.
When JCVD opens, Van Damme has been just scraping by for years. He’s grinding out cheap vehicles for the streaming and direct-to-DVD market. He’s not as fast or as flexible as he once was. He misses his marks and is dismissed and disparaged by his own director. And he’s locked in a painful custody dispute with his ex-wife over their daughter, who wants to live with her mother rather than her famous dad.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent gives its deeply flawed protagonist a daughter as well. If you want to humanize a big celebrity in a movie like this I suppose there’s no better way than by giving them a daughter to disappoint.
Then things get really bad. The fictionalized Van Damme is sucked into a messy bank robbery/hostage situation and in the confusion and disorder the police, the press and the public come to think that he’s one of the bank robbers and not an innocent bystander trapped in a situation that grows more dangerous and heated by the minute.
JCVD has a-chronological timeline that bounces manically between the hostage situation and Van Damme’s life leading up to it. Van Damme’s personal and professional life represent a gauntlet of humiliations.
Steven Seagal only needs to cut off his pony-tail to steal a role from Van Damme. His new movies are so cheap that his still sizable salary leaves precious little left in the budget for production values or name actors, more or less ensuring that they’ll be interchangeable RedBox products rather than work that he can be proud of.
Like a pre-comeback Cage, Van Damme made so many bad movies that audiences began to forget that he was even capable of making good ones. Also like Cage, the general idea of JCVD is to drop an eccentric real-life action icon into one of their late-period vehicles in a way that comments on the peculiar nature of their late-period fame in particular and the tragicomedy of being a celebrity in general.
JCVD opens with a very long, seemingly uninterrupted take (I say seemingly because I know how filmmakers are with their tricks and cheating and using the magic of cinema to confuse us) where a clearly tired and unenthusiastic Van Damme punches and kicks and battles his way through a small army of heavies.
He’s a professional but he’s also clearly seen his better days. He’s no longer the magnificent physical specimen he once was and he doesn’t hit all of his marks but when he complains to his director he’s blown off as a prima donna who still thinks he’s working with John Woo when he’s churning out crap for the home video market.
It’s a remarkable sequence that epitomizes the movie’s unrelenting focus on Van Damme as an actor and human being as well as a man of action. There’s a reason they’re called action heroes rather than acting heroes but in JCVD Van Damme doesn’t just act. He ACTS! He emotes! He performs heart-wrenching monologues. It’s perhaps the first time a Jean Claude Van Damme movie could be sent to members of the Academy with “For Your Consideration” at the bottom of the screen and have it not be seen as a joke.
Van Damme acts like he’s never acted before in JCVD but in many of my favorite scenes he just exists onscreen. He doesn’t need to do anything: can just be himself and it is utterly riveting.
There are consequently two parts of JCVD. There’s the perhaps excessively stylish action movie component, where a man who feels like anything but a hero in his own life is called upon to defeat real criminals. Then there’s the darkly funny, utterly revealing character study aspect where Van Damme takes a long, hard look in the mirror and reflects powerfully and poetically on the long, strange journey that has been his personal and professional life.
That is the subject of the famous six minute long monologue late in the film’s first act where its star faces us directly and, with tears in his eyes and raw emotion in his voice, tries to make sense of his life.
JCVD is not a subtle film. It is big and broad and operatic in its outsized emotions but it works. The opening and the monologue shamelessly call attention to themselves and beg to be singled out for praise but they also deserve to be singled out for praise.
The character study aspect of JCVD is far more compelling than the genre stuff but even if JCVD is uneven it’s nevertheless an audacious and revelatory experiment that illustrates that Van Damme can do more than just fight and do the splits: he can act his ass off as well when given the opportunity and no movie has ever given Van Damme a chance to act the way that this one does, even the ones where he plays identical twins (yes, there’s more than one).
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