Seanbaby
Jean-Claude Van Damme is arguably our country's greatest president. He has a fight record of 4078-0 with 831 no contests due to Doing the Splits and Punching Balls. He gets a boner on international television every 46 hours, at precisely the same mathematical rate that humans are attacked by sharks, but science calls this "coincidence." He has crushed enough testicles to fill 14 oatmeal museums. Yet despite these impressive figures, our love affair with him has gone cold. For many years, America's only interaction with Van Damme has been when fat people collapse at exactly the right spot of Blockbuster video.
The film
Now that you can gaze upon it without going mad, I will be using the standard Van Dammeter for each DVD. It's the standardized system I developed to measure the Van Dammajesty of any movie, except ones without Jean-Claude Van Damme in them. It's a scale from one to 10 that takes into consideration all of the important qualities of a picture. Naked, muscly ass with or without an excuse? Is the romantic lead a sassy female reporter? Is there a muddy fight in the rain, with everything on the line? And of course, splits. Other criteria are also taken into consideration but you'd have to wear five sets of goggles to even read a description of how complicated they are. I'm risking a lot with even how much I've said already.
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Jean-Claude Van Damme as... Ben Archer, a bouncer who kicks ass first and talks never.
The Villain: Ben Archer's wife works for INS, and after finding a container filled with Chinese immigrants, she brings one home with her. Now, what she doesn't know is that this is the daughter of international criminal Sun Quan, played by Simon Yam (Naked Killer 2). You might not recognize that movie because it was also distributed with the title
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Cinematography: Now you have to realize that this is not only not a classic JCVD movie, it's barely even a movie. Hours pass between action scenes, and after JCVD's wife dies, there's no one left alive that talks. It's like an uncompromising exploration of cinematic violence as art. No car is crashed without a visual metaphor and 40 crane shots. Knocking on a door in Wake of Death requires 15 camera setups and twice as many jump cuts. I can't tell if Jean-Claude is working with a brilliant cinematographer or the International Society for Triggering Epileptic Seizures.
JCVD, accustomed to madness, is unfazed by this assignment. He selects a small Asian man doing shitty taekwondo and another guy doing capoeira cartwheels. And a cowboy. I think in the director's cut he also gets an Eskimo and a teenwolf, who fit together to form a truck. He almost overlooks a miniature kickboxing girl until she proves she can fight by standing toe-to-toe with Jean-Claude's kneecaps and wildly missing with 300 punches in a row. Keep in mind that JCVD is an actor and a
I Swear to God, This is Really the Plot: The first thing JCVD does is screw up an undercover art smuggling sting and get his female partner killed. Then he kicks the hell out of her mourning husband. He blows off a date with his wife to drink alone in a bar where he and a barfly discover that he's a cop and she's a hooker. "I won't charge you if you won't charge me," he tells her, right before it cuts to him pounding her over a pool table. To give you the moral barometer of the film, that's the only line in the movie that doesn't have the word fuck in it.
Let's Recover From a Coma, Gang! Since no one in this movie is nice, his wife's new boyfriend mocks Van Damme's recovery with, "From asshole to vegetable in one bullet!" Van Damme slowly relearns how to walk and talk, and I intend no insult when I say that he performs not knowing how to do these things very well. In fact, I'd say "Recovering Coma Guy" was the role he was born for if he hadn't already played "Gay Karate Man" in
Jean-Claude Van Damme as... Jack Robideaux, a cop who counters his lack of personality by carrying a bunny.
Touchy Subject: When a cop is transferred to a border town and put in charge of keeping illegals out, a normal movie would have him start as a hard-nosed xenophobe that slowly empathizes with the hardships these proud people are trying to escape. Well, Jean-Claude doesn't make normal movies-- he kicks them until his leg breaks. In this movie about border crossing, he only meets two Mexicans, and neither time does it go well.
Dramatic Defusing! The bomb squad guy shouts, "It's an optical fiber based CLC casing!" to Jean-Claude and several other people who wouldn't know what that means. If he expected someone to say something about how smart he was, no one did, and he snips his first wire. Oops. He briefly exchanges with the Latin gentleman the international expression for "oh shit," and dives away from him and his exploding chunks. It seems like the only real training he received in bomb school was the ability to awesomely somersault away from detonating Mexicans, so he might as well have let JCVD take a crack at it.
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