God Damme! The Top 5 Jean-Claude Van Damme Movies Of All Time

4.  Lionheart (1990): Van Damme is an exiled Foreign Legionnaire who becomes the darling of an underground prize-fighting circuit run by a particularly cartoonish group of yuppie sadists. It's human cock-fighting mostly taking place in garages and semi-empty swimming pools. The greatness of early Van Dammage is you really crave only the thinnest premise to see the guy crack some skulls. And this movie delivers. The fight sequences are quite retro at this point — not strung together with the disorienting quick-edit fury of a Paul Greengrass Bourne movie. JCVD's early brawl scenes have the exact opposite impulse: you're more likely to get three redundant slow-mo views of the same finishing groin strike than a hundred cuts of mincing open palm karate strikes. There is perhaps a bit too much of his interlocutors simply walking into vicious head kicks, but Van Damme's style is actually a blend of the preposterous and — because of his insanely limber physique and his own legitimate career inside the ring — the completely authentic. Absolutely nothing about a Van Damme jump kick needs to be faked in post.

5. JCVD (2008): This film may duck the drug use and bipolar mania that has made Van Damme such an irascible Hollywood character at times, but this quasi-autobiographical flick is the best evidence on film that the man can really act. Jean-Claude gives a genuinely subtle performance in a bizarro universe where, by chance, he becomes embroiled in a disorganized bank burglary. The movie is a good reminder that a lot of guys can throw some version of a jumping wheel kick, but only Van Damme can do it in an earnestly charming broken Franco-English accent. JCVD does have some of the irritating qualities of a low-budget Euro Hollywood knockoff: a hop-scotching temporal structure that circles back on itself with facile ineptitude, and a troubling effort to meld the most irritating visual quirks of Guy Ritchie, with the most irritating audio quirks of Steven Soderbergh.

The film's biggest problem, though, is that its high concept tantalizes you with the prospect of a meta pop-culture masterpiece, while the actual script substitutes a heist plot — as a metaphor perhaps, if we’re being generous — for an actual accounting of the demons that have bedeviled the star. It leaves you wishing for a film that had a bit more courage in deconstructing Van Damme to his darkest core. Now that would have been an immense film.

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