In 1992 Jean-Claude Van Damme was sitting in a splits kick astride the world. The former body building champion and genuine full-contact karate knockout artist (19-1, with 18 KO’s) was riding a string of high-kicking lo-fi gems to his first big-budget affair: the unexpected Roland Emmerich sci-fi hit, Universal Soldier. The film’s $102-million worldwide haul caught the attention of major studios, and faster than a jumping wheel kick, a three-picture deal worth a reported $36 million was steadied in front of the Belgium-born ballerino like a pre-cut breakboard.
A shower of cheap pine splinters and expensive champagne should have followed for the action star who was in command of more fighting ability than all of the muscled lunks lumbering through 90's shoot-em-ups combined. But Van Damme turned out to be his own worst enemy. In an admitted haze of drugs, alcohol and manic self-regard, the 'muscles from Brussels' turned his cocaine-tinged nose up at the best offer he would ever see, striking a precision death blow to his promising career instead.
In 2004, on the UK TV show, Jean-Claude Van Damme: Behind Closed Doors, he recalled: "After the movie Timecop, I received a huge offer for a three-picture deal and it was $12 million per picture. That's $36 million. I was wasted. I said, 'I want 20 million like Jim Carrey' and they hung up on me. I was not myself."
JCVD may never really have recovered from that error in judgment that cost him a long, lucrative career on the big screen, but there is some consolation. His first foray into major box office success, Universal Soldier, has become a venerable franchise (with and without him) anyway. The fourth Van Damme helmed installation of the zombie-commando series, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, hits the Video on Demand market Thursday, with a small theatrical run set for November 30. In honor of this undead quadrilogy and its still-kicking lead, it's high time to pay a little homage to four essential classics that set up Van Damme for a fall in the first place - and one newish film that will have you cursing the demons that stole from us more of the man's best.
1. Kickboxer (1989): Half-baked JCVD fans who never really connected with the actor’s work on the emotional level it deserves will tell you that Bloodsport (1987) — the movie that unearthed the oiled majesty of Van Damme in the first place — is his greatest film, bar none. These people are heretics. Bloodsport is no doubt is a worthy martial arts tournament film, but its premise of fighting — possibly to the death — as sport, violates the warrior-code and undermines the righteous excitement of the inexorable flashback training montage where a punch drunk hero dream-trips his way to a final showdown comeback.
Kickboxer has been dismissed as The Karate Kid in Thailand, and maybe it is, but like Daniel-son and Miyagi, there's a worthy mentor-pupil relationship at heart of this irony-free, persistently charming cheese fest. It's the kind of low-budget movie-making that doesn't exist anymore, complete with an original synthy score. The track that plays over the opening credits, "Streets of Siam," is a genuine jam and accompanies one of the most memorably tone-deaf on-screen jock performances of all time from real-life kickboxing superstar, Dennis "The Terminator" Alexio. Oh, and Van Damme drunkenly disco dances his way into a gratuitous barroom brawl. It's B-movie perfection.
2. Bloodsport (1988): Okay, you can take what I just wrote about this movie with a grain of salt. It only pales in comparison to Kickboxer but rocks on its own. The essential pleasure of this film is its spot-on use of archetypal characters that surround a slightly bland Van Damme. The lovably oafish Donald Gibb as Van Damme's best friend is the beer-drinking ugly American who greets a fight to the death with the casual confidence of an archer entering a biker-bar darts tournament. Even more memorable is villain Bolo Yeung, an actor whose fleshy, singularly menacing face competes for attention with his bouncing-ball pec-flexing. The character's signature finishing move, in which he splits the shinbones of his rivals with a grazing heel strike, is genuinely shudder inducing. And Van Damme's character is given a justifiable reason for vengeance after his beer-drinking buddy falls to the baddy. It's bloody. It's sporting. Just don't say it's better than Kickboxer.
3. Death Warrant (1990): Van Damme plays Burke, a Canadian cop who goes undercover in an American prison to root out a black market organ-harvesting operation. This movie does have hues of the darker, less fun atmosphere that colored Van Damme's too-serious mid-career STV misses. That noir-on-the-cheap vibe, however, is responsible for creating the best villain in the JCVD cannon. "You can't kill me Burke, I'm the Sandman," taunts Patrick Kilpatrick's frighteningly resilient psychopath. But that only means more opportunity for Van Damme to wobble around groggily in his classic wide karate stance before rallying his senses to chest kick said Sandman into a lava-hot open boiler — and then again onto a steel bolt. That would be too much of a spoiler if it were actually the end of the final epic fight scene. It's not . . . because you can't kill The Sandman.
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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