Damme the Torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead!
Fiction, comics and a children's book. Found: a collection of old newspaper cartoons. Six films. I assume my destiny as the first critic (I bet) to ever quote Tolstoy in assessing a Van Damme picture.
I’m just about halfway through Anna Karenina and digging it, though before the turn of 2022 I wasn’t maintaining a pace sufficient for such a lengthy novel. Recently I’ve been keeping to twenty pages a day and have dropped into a nice groove. Anna gives a troubled birth to Vronsky’s illegitimate child while her husband Karenin now knows of their extramarital relationship and is preparing to push aggressively for divorce and full custody of their son. Karenin was vaguely contemplating demonstrating his manhood by challenging Vronsky to a duel, which comes to pass in a subtle and unexpected fashion when the two men face one another over Anna’s sickbed where the straitlaced and measured cuckold Karenin maintains his composure and dignity while the dashing, passionate interloper Vronsky is rattled to the point of a sincere attempt at suicide. I reckon Tolstoy’s point here is that the duel has happened after all, but in a form and with an outcome that neither man foresaw.
I was struck by a passage describing Anna’s state of mind during some of this turmoil which I incidentally felt could describe an emotional condition which all but the most imperturbable of us have had ready access to over the last couple of years. Writes Tolstoy, “Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.” That summarizes my position most of the time these days — with so many actuarial variables by which to multiply one another, it can be more difficult to feel fear or hope than to succumb to pure bewilderment over just what it is we’re meant to fear or hope for. Part of the point of this newsletter is to remind myself that, barring some series of much greater disasters on a scale I can’t fathom, nerding out over literature, comics and movies will always be a furnace that will warm my spirit if I feed it the right sort of fuel.
This is easy when one is occupying a nice house with a fancy television and shelves crammed with books of all sorts. As with the last friend’s pad where I was staying in another part of San Francisco, the owners of the house where I’m currently living are lovers of art and literature and I recently nabbed several titles from their shelves by some of the greatest-ever practitioners of the cartooning medium: an entry from a series I didn’t know existed called Waiting for Food Number 3: More Restaurant Placemat Drawings by R. Crumb and the classic late-Eighties graphic novel Watchmen written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. This was my first time reading Watchmen in twenty years and I found it to be even better than I remembered.
In the wild I found a fun children’s book by Michael Slack called Elecopter (an elephant who is also a helicopter, a whimsically simple premise that Slack executes skillfully) and a meaty collection of Doonesbury’s Greatest Hits, “A Mid-Seventies Revue” by the legendary G.B. Trudeau “with an Overture” by the conservative television personage William F. Buckley, Jr., who writes in as icy, bizarre, lofty and constipated a tone as he spoke with as the host of the original Firing Line program. I like much of Doonesbury even when I don’t always have the historical context to fully understand what’s going on, and this collection will be the first Doonesbury book I’ve read since 2015. My preferred mode of living involves constantly having a collection of classic newspaper strips at hand to be read at the rate of at least two pages each morning, so this was a most timely find.
All six of the pictures I’ve been watching feature a lead performance from the internationally-recognized Belgian actor and martial arts stuntman Jean-Claude Van Damme. I was fascinated by Van Damme as a kid in the Nineties when he was carving out a dominant position in the action cinema marketplace, perhaps not financially outpacing more mature box office competitors like Schwarzenegger and Stallone but certainly cementing a stirring new model for the genre with his impressive stunt fighting technique, astonishing physical beauty and the combination of a smooth Francophone accent with a soft, mid-range speaking voice that was easier on the ears than Stallone’s Manhattan-accented contrabass or the insistent harshness of Schwarzenegger’s Austrian staccato. Those parody-ripe voices belonged to stars who were bigger than Van Damme both physically and financially, but Van Damme was younger and handsomer and was so incomparable as a stunt coordinator and on-screen fighter that he carved out a unique sector in the marketplace that was never properly occupied after he later vacated it due to personal issues and career decline. As a preadolescent lad I knew and respected that those other guys were better actors who participated in slicker and overall more interesting projects, but on the basis strictly of a persona that encompassed both striking good looks and some transcendently badass technique, Van Damme was the Nineties action star I thought was simply and incontrovertibly the coolest.
One of my funnest days back then involved flipping channels on a weekend and happening to catch, in its entirety, a broadcast of the Van Damme film Lionheart. In revisiting Van Damme’s oeuvre these past several weeks I started with Lionheart (my first time seeing it as it was meant to be seen, without interruption or any editing-out of profanities or Van Damme’s trademark baring of his exemplary bottom). Here are the six Van Damme pictures I watched, presented in the order in which I watched ‘em.
Lionheart, directed by Sheldon Lettich, 1991. Van Damme got a co-writing credit on this picture along with director Lettich and this arrangement works fantastically well. In his Hollywood pictures Van Damme usually plays a character who has some plausible (or not-so-plausible) reason for having a French or Belgian accent, and in the case of Lionheart the whole story is built around this necessity, with Van Damme playing a Legionnaire who goes AWOL and illegally enters the United States of America through New York City so he can find his way to Los Angeles to support the destitute family of his brother who has been burned alive by a criminal gang. The character is named Lyon and gets dubbed “Lionheart” by a rough-around-the-edges promoter of underground street fights who recognizes Lionheart’s talent and helps him get the money he needs by ushering him into an exclusive fighting community for the entertainment of wealthy high rollers. This picture is notable for having almost no gunplay and only one on-screen death which itself is incidental to the main storyline; Lionheart fights but doesn’t kill, and the whole premise of his being lionhearted is based around the fact that literally all he cares about is winning fights so he can earn money to look after his brother’s widow and daughter. The classy, elegant and attractive leader of the high-end gambling circle is eager to have sex but he is not tempted, and moreover he doesn’t even really care about honor, since in putting familial love first he abandons his duties in the Foreign Legion and runs afoul of the French government, providing a ticking-time-bomb element for the workmanlike screenplay in the form of goons dispatched to the USA to drag him back to France before he can win enough money to get his loved ones out of debt. He’s also vulnerable, proceeding from fight to fight against ever-more-formidable opponents, finally facing one so dangerous that even Lionheart’s manager reveals he has bet against him. He does so out of concern for Lionheart, telling him that if he gives up the fight they can split the winnings, but this proves to be one of the biggest stumbles in an otherwise great movie; after the final fight there should have been another turn where the manager, who is played very well by an actor named Harrison Page, explains that he lied to Lionheart about betting against him, which would have meant that they both would have been far richer after Lionheart stands his ground and would have suggested that the manager both cared for Lionheart enough to lie but also believed deep down in his stalwart fighting abilities. I’m genuinely befuddled as to why no one involved in production saw that this was quite clearly the correct ending, which would have just about tied a bow on what is otherwise a sprightly, buoyant, easy-to-like sport-fighting B-picture. Like I said, the coda has a couple of notable missteps, but nevertheless this is highly recommended.
Double Impact, directed by Sheldon Lettich, 1991. As with Lionheart, this picture was co-written by Van Damme and Lettich. They make a great team; Lionheart and Double Impact are the best movies on this list by far. Lettich is a skilled and confident director; Double Impact opens with one of the best movie shootout sequences I’ve ever seen, and that’s before Van Damme even makes an appearance! Whether with hand-to-hand fight scenes, elaborate shoot-em-up set pieces or the Hong Kong “gun fu” style that blends the two in which Double Impact is eager to traffic, Lettich’s action sequences have great pacing and a clear sense of geography, which makes them interesting, exciting and easy to follow. Lettich and Van Damme are quite clearly ripping off some of their concepts and aesthetic from the likes of the genius auteur John Woo, but you can’t say they aren’t stealing from the best. (And they’re not coy about it; the picture is even set in Hong Kong.)
Van Damme, neither a disaster nor an especial talent as an actor, has set a worthwhile bar for himself that he just barely clears in Double Impact, playing identical twin brothers who are separated at birth and who (since this is Van Damme playing them) just happen to individually grow up with Francophone accents, excellent physiques and badass fighting skills. One of them is a good-natured goofball with tacky pastel-and-khaki taste in clothing named Chad and the other an ill-tempered businessman with shady connections named Alex; neither knows of the other’s existence until they are reunited by a decades-old conspiracy to defraud and murder their parents. The story involves them shooting, kicking and detonating a swath through the Hong Kong underworld under the guidance of Chad’s adoptive father and with the help of Alex’s pretty girlfriend. Besides this solid setup which furnishes plenty of great action, the movie has its uncomplicated but effective moral priorities in order: to succeed Chad and Alex must put aside the differences that make them dislike one another and realize that their opposing approaches to life and combat (integrity vs. cynicism, decorum vs. bluntness and so on) are actually complimentary. Chad and Alex symbolically must confront and accept the things they dislike most about themselves to become an unstoppable fighting family unit, save the people they love and restore justice. (They pull it off.)
This picture makes a fantastic one-two kick with Lionheart precisely because the films are at once so alike and so different. Both are very good, enjoyable and well-made and have a similar visual and narrative feel that is an outgrowth from the strong roots of the Van Damme/Lettich creative partnership. But they also mark a healthy contrast; Lionheart is in some ways an old-school sports-fighting picture that recalls genre progenitors like Enter the Dragon or Van Damme’s breakout role in Bloodsport, while Double Impact is a blazing, lethal, grand-scale Nineties action spectacle characterized by all of the era’s genre tropes (which were well on their way to becoming clichés, partly because they were so overused in movies like this one):
running in slow motion from a massive exploding conflagration,
using both hands to frantically discharge two semiautomatic handguns at the same time while screaming in fury,
demonstrating one’s manly self-confidence by laying weapons aside for a hand-to-hand confrontation with a vicious miniboss character,
corny puns and one-liners,
a wonderfully ridiculous bespoke rap theme song that plays over the end credits,
lots (and lots and lots) of dead henchmen and villains,
and the straightforward and solicitous presentation of what Tolstoy in Anna Karenina describes as a “shapely, well-rounded and much-exposed bust.”
If you’re only going to watch one movie from this list, Double Impact is unquestionably the one to go with. It instantiates the ideal balance of sincerity and humor and for all of its silliness and the exposed seams of its B-movie aesthetic it’s one of the best action movies I’ve ever seen, finding Van Damme in peak fettle physically, technically and creatively.
Maximum Risk, directed by Ringo Lam, 1996. Curiously this one also has a premise that involves Van Damme playing identical twin brothers separated at birth, though in Maximum Risk Van Damme never has to play against himself on-screen because one brother sets the story in motion by dying early in the film, which brings his existence to the attention of the other brother who then serves as the film’s protagonist. This protagonist is a French policeman and his interest in learning more about the circumstances of his brother’s violent death lead him to New York City where he and his dead brother’s attractive girlfriend find themselves squeezed between Russian gangsters (one of them played by the great character actor Zach Grenier) and a cell of corrupt FBI agents (one of them played by the great character actor Paul Ben-Victor).
In the five years before this film and after Double Impact, Van Damme performed in his classic run of peak A-list productions like Universal Soldier, Hard Target, Timecop, Street Fighter and Sudden Death. Maximum Risk has the misfortune of having the slick, professional, competently mainstream Hollywood look that global audiences had come to expect from Van Damme pictures but without any of the novelty or ingenuity of his earlier work. That discrepancy gives Maximum Risk a tired, hollow, obligatory feeling; it looks good (including several well-designed car chase sequences), but the story, dialogue and characters are trite and absurd and no one seems to be able to muster the enthusiasm to believe in the material. (A peculiar sidekick cabbie character who perishes in the protagonist’s arms is played by an actor named Frank van Keeken, most well-remembered for his funny performance as “Vegetable Lasagna” in Seinfeld but who has a rougher time doing anything useful with the strange, misguided material he’s given in Maximum Risk.)
This isn’t a massive embarassment for Van Damme but it’s a bummer in its uninventive, by-the-book dreariness and is the least fun to sit through of the films on this list. The transition from this deflated mainstream submission to the camp absurdities that come next on Van Damme’s filmography and on my watchlist for this entry makes an unambiguous statement about the turn his career was taking at this juncture.
Double Team, directed by Tsui Hark, 1997. We are firmly in so-bad-it’s-good territory here. This movie is kooky, overcooked nonsense that flirts with, but ultimately fails to capitalize on, a flavor of over-the-top self-parody (Van Damme would get introspection and self-reflection right at other points in his career, which I’ll come to presently).
Double Team has very poor direction, insipid writing and a laughably ridiculous sidekick performance from the legendary Nineties NBA bad-boy eccentric Dennis Rodman, playing an inventor and arms dealer with a sense of style modeled on Rodman’s own, cycling through various ludicrous outfits and hairstyles throughout the picture while tossing off cringe basketball-themed one-liners.
The story is a succession of premises that keep getting introduced and sidelined, but generally settles around Van Damme’s commando protagonist squaring off against an evil criminal mastermind played by one of my favorite actors, the great Mickey Rourke. (To comment that Rourke seems game to do the best he can with bad material would be to take an irrelevant measurement of Double Team, since this film is nonsensical to the point of reducing this kind of analysis to an abstraction.) Along the way the protagonist gets his death faked and finds himself exiled to a secret island “Colony” that is at once a prison, luxury resort and Illuminati-style global intelligence cabal. (I’m doing my best to describe this premise both succinctly and accurately, which is harder than it sounds.)
This zany, off-the-wall picture works extremely hard to make as little sense as possible. It is fun and colorful and utterly ridiculous. Testosterone-fueled Nineties action excess is injected with garish neon camp, resulting in the textbook definition of “so bad it’s good.” Strongly recommended for intoxicated group viewing.
Knock Off, directed by Tsui Hark, 1998. Following promptly on the heels of Double Team, Knock Off is credited to the same director and pushes into territory that Double Team gestured at but didn’t pursue as aggressively (or ineptly) as Knock Off does — the then-fashionable vogue for fusing the genres of action and buddy comedy.
In Double Team Van Damme is the heavyweight action straight man while Rodman is meant to provide the eccentricity and comic relief. As far as I know Rodman had no training or significant prior experience as an actor or comedian and yet he still does a less shitty job at both than Rob Schneider does playing Van Damme’s goofy foil and sidekick in Knock Off. Perhaps Rodman, coming as he did from outside of the movie business, was buoyed by the overconfidence of a neophyte, whereas one can never really believe in any of Schneider’s dozens of television and film performances because it’s always so pathetically obvious that Schneider himself doesn’t believe in them. Schneider is one of those head-scratching figures who sometimes mount successful careers in mainstream American entertainment — a professional actor and comedian who is bad at acting and is not funny. That Schneider himself always seems dimly aware of this and that it appears to prevent him from enjoying his chosen trade just makes it all the more excruciating to watch him try.
Knock Off also missteps by pushing Van Damme himself out of the straight man role and trying to make him funny alongside of Schneider, and the results are weird and uncomfortable. The premise involves them working as business partners in Hong Kong who sell clothes or something, and maybe also other stuff. And Schneider’s character is actually a CIA operative, but then his handler, played by the distinguished actor Paul Sorvino, turns out to be the main villain, or something. There’s a ton of other extraneous, poorly-played characters and inexplicable nonsense going on but I don’t want to waste ink getting into it all here, since anyway it’s all sound and fury signifying nothing.
This movie is unspeakably shitty, incoherent and crudely-made. Where Double Team looked dazzlingly and laughably awful, Knock Off looks depressingly cheap and just about two steps above a home movie. Double Team just barely made some kind of narrative sense where Knock Off makes none whatsoever and has a story that is nihilistically incomprehensible, badly acted and shittily-edited. If you think I’m exaggerating, take a look for yourself; it honestly looks like something that barely would have made it onto late-night Nineties cable television. It’s strange and surprising that Van Damme had fallen into a professional abyss this deep just a few short years after some of his biggest and most successful pictures.
The Last Mercenary, directed by David Charhon, 2021. Van Damme has worked consistently in the ensuing decades and has found his way back to mainstream acceptability, getting in on some of those sweet, sweet Netflix dollars and starring in this upbeat, well-crafted, cheeky and genuinely charming self-referential retrospective analysis of the Van Damme mythos. There’s even a quick aside where Van Damme’s aging-badass protagonist espies a poster for Bloodsport and makes some snide remark about it; Van Damme and his collaborators are at last doing self-parody with conscientious wit, warmth and intentionality, all of which one feels in every frame of The Last Mercenary.
This is also noteworthy for being the first time I’ve seen Van Damme perform a movie entirely in French (and with an all-Francophone cast and script, no less), and his acting here is the best I’ve seen from him. I guess when you’ve played the lead in as many movies as Van Damme has, it’s impossible not to get less bad at acting. Which is good because Van Damme is older and can’t perform the fight choreography as acrobatically and enthusiastically as he used to, though he’s still game to try.
When he does in The Last Mercenary, they manage to build enjoyable, modest, well-directed action sequences around him, particularly in a key brawl sequence set in a health club bathroom that is as fast-paced, colorful and well-edited as anything he’s ever done. It feels like the tone of enthusiastic and silly but still hard-knuckled action that would have made movies like Double Team unironically good. As with much of The Last Mercenary, this central fight sequence exudes the feeling that everyone working on it was cooperating and having fun, warmly inviting the viewer to do the same.
The premise is that Van Damme’s protagonist is a legendary “mercenary” (actually a government operative, but they keep saying “mercenary” I think just because it sounds better) with a grown son he’s never met but has provided for by means of a government stipend. When a cabal of criminals and corrupt insiders try to abuse his son’s identity for a profitable smuggling scheme, Van Damme’s character must reunite with the son and root out their enemies with the help of a looseknit circle of sympathetic allies drawn from the ranks of government and from the son’s rough-and-tumble housing-project neighborhood.
This all doesn’t quite cohere into a great movie, and there are patches of tedium and that particular Netflixy flavor of oh-so-precious nostalgia where an old dog actor is reverentially taught some new tricks by a proficient writer/director who grew up imbibing his material. I’m not against this per se, especially since it’s nice to see Van Damme get his due in a great-looking, professionally-assembled picture that shows respect for an action movie legend who made his mark on the genre while evincing a comfortable sense of whimsy and optimism.
The Last Mercenary is low-key exciting when it wants to be and lightly funny when it needs to be; it’s part cartoon, part Netflix nostalgia romp and part old-fashioned action movie, populated by a diverse assemblage of talented French-speaking actors who wrangled some healthy chuckles out of me. (Maybe part of the film’s design is that, as befitting our Age of the Streaming Platform when content is meant to simply be on as much as actually paid attention to, The Last Mercenary is the kind of thing you can tune in and out of while you’re cooking or exercising or whatever; it has a somewhat disjointed and episodic feel with plot details that become increasingly irrelevant as it ambles towards a reasonable and unshowy conclusion.)
The Last Mercenary might not be of much interest if you’ve never seen any of Van Damme’s other work, but if you’re at all into him, I’d definitely recommend giving this a look. It would be best enjoyed with a good friend, perhaps the kind who likes to talk over and laugh about a movie while you’re watching it, since Van Damme and his collaborators appear to have constructed this picture specifically with that type of fun and open-minded engagement in mind.
This has been a great few weeks of film-watching and when I can I’m going to get back to looking at more Van Damme pictures.
Next: Shifting genres and catching up on a series of adventure films I never got around to seeing, the first of which is now close to a decade old.