More Than Muscles

Facets Features writer Michelle Nelson finds unexpected beauty in JCVD (warning, thar be spoilers ahead)...


I don’t know anything about Jean Claude Van Damme.

Well, anything is a stretch. I know two things: he’s the muscles, and he’s from Brussels.

I’m too young to have experienced the Strong-Man action phase that Hollywood went through in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, so I missed out on his heyday. By the time I started paying attention, his movies had stopped running in theaters and were rehashes, basically, of long-winded action sequences from other movies, released straight to DVD where they found a market that kept him alive in pop culture.

After 2001, the landscape for film heroes in Hollywood changed. The general audience wasn’t willing to accept men like Stallone, Arnold or Van Damme as their saviors anymore. We turned instead to superheroes or completely average people overcoming odds. The Strong-man was viewed as cheesy and vapid: their movies to be taken out for spins at parties and watched with nothing but irony. Van Damme spent nine years in this purgatory as the butt of many jokes. And though I don’t know how bad it actually was, I feel justified in saying it was worth the wait for him to have JCVD as a comeback vehicle.

JCVD is a delicious story, fed to us in disjointed parts. We accept that Van Damme, like most actors who portray themselves in fictional works, isn’t being himself. He’s a character, but the line’s pretty thin.

Numerous wives and divorces, a kicked drug habit, poverty--all of these elements are present in both the actor’s personal and onscreen life. Van Damme doesn’t spend a lot of time developing his character here: we already know who he is. Instead, we’re immediately thrown into the setup of the plot and introduced to the idea that this movie moves quick.

The film is so hyper-aware that Van Damme is playing himself that it jumps around a lot, lobbing satire and criticisms in every direction. Nothing really sticks, however.

The media, fictionalized violence, bad fathers, and materialism all take obvious hits, as if the screenwriters were trying too hard. Characters speak in strange philosophical sentences, slipping between English and French with ease. This, apparently, is something Van Damme—the real Van Damme—is known for. The Belgian natives call it Zen Franglais. It doesn’t matter--only half of it works and only a fourth of it makes sense.

The editing and cinematography work with this disjoint to confuse us further. Giant pieces of information are cut out of dialog scenes—jumping into important conversations right before they end—while tons of violent developments and movements happen off screen as a lazy camera meanders about in a long take.

The high contrast lighting leaves the bright world outside overexposed and flaring, while keeping much of the inside action in shadows. The de-saturated colors make things hard to distinguish and flatten each image to let us know this is a manipulation of recorded frames. Suspension of disbelief is unnecessary because we’re not supposed to buy what’s happening. It doesn’t make sense right away, but there’s no doubt about it: the audience understands it’s watching a movie.

JCVD is not an action movie. For the first two thirds, it seems to be more about petty criminals.

Van Damme, having the worst day of his life, walks into a bank. We stay outside the building with a taxi driver, two shop owners and a police officer. Gun fire erupts from inside the bank. It appears as if Van Damme is robbing the place. But you know what they say about appearances.

The film has intense homages to Dog Day Afternoon—one of the moody criminals is dressed like a modernized version of John Cazale’s Sal. When the police decide that it’s Van Damme who’s holding the hostages and robbing the bank, hoards of people show-up at the crime scene ready for action. More than half the crowd openly mocks the police. They don’t scream “ATTICA,” but the mood is similar. The crowd sides with the celebrity.

Van Damme, the muscles, is overpowered by life at this point in the film: the director on his latest project thinks he’s stupid and hires Steven Seagal in his place; his ex-wife wins sole custody of their only child; the police think he’s the robber; the real perpetrators force him at gunpoint to do their bidding; he’s in debt and his friends and co-workers won’t bail him out. By the time Van Damme gets to the bank, he’s so immersed in self-pity and self-loathing that he caves to the robber’s scattered demands.

Once the cops establish the situation and set up a perimeter, the film takes a giant leap backwards and restarts the story from Van Damme’s point of view. We get pretty much everything this time—who the real criminals are, what they want and how violent they’re ready to become. But something is still missing.

About an hour into the movie, Van Damme sits in a chair at the bank. We’ve just wrapped up his POV segment. Suddenly, Van Damme’s floats upwards. He rises above the heads of his fellow hostages, over the desks and offices, over the set even. He turns to the camera and addresses us.

What starts out as biographical turns philosophical and becomes a beautiful speech that culminates with breathtaking simplicity.

“It’s so stupid to kill people…they’re so beautiful.” The speech doesn’t land the earlier criticisms the film made about media coverage or fictionalized and glorified violence, it brings the movie into focus.

The film up to this point gives answers before questions, but Van Damme’s speech serves as the turning point. He explains himself, “This movie is for me,” finishes, sinks back down to the bank and becomes the hero we expect him to be.

The last half hour is as perfect and wonderful as anything I’ve ever seen. It completes the narrative arc, and continues with the stylized constraints from the beginning. Van Damme kicks ass. But the ending is also about as far as can be from the standard action movie ending. It’s unmerciful and haunting because, in the world of artifice the filmmakers sucked us into, the final dose of reality seems cruel and unwarranted. But, once again, it doesn’t matter. This film, as it politely reminds us in many ways, wasn’t made for us. We should be glad we even get to see it.