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I’m within the excellent place to re-watch and write concerning the 2008 action-comedy-psychodrama JCVD. It’s hitting all my candy spots today. I’m, in any case, very deep into the method of writing a mammoth guide about movies about making movies, The Fractured Mirror. I simply accomplished the 168th piece for the guide, on the little liked 2016 animated darkish comedy Nerdland.
I’m even deeper into the method of watching ALL of Nicolas Cage and John Travolta’s movies for The Travolta/Cage Undertaking and the Travolta/Cage podcast and one in every of Cage’s most vital and pleasant late-period automobile is that this 12 months’s The Insufferable Weight of Large Expertise.
Cage’s well-received comeback comedy could be very overtly “JCVD however with Nicolas Cage.” That seems to be such a successful recipe that Cage’s movie is best than its inspiration as a result of its star is best than Van Damme as an actor if not as a martial artist.
I say that as an enormous fan of Van Damme and somebody who has had the privilege of revisiting lots of his most iconic, bizarre and attention-grabbing movies for one very beneficiant, very appreciated patron.
This journey again via Van Damme’s golden-era filmography has given me a brand new appreciation for his items, chief amongst them his extraordinary magnificence. Van Damme has lengthy reigned as probably the most lovely man in action, if not movies as a complete.
I by no means tire of taking a look at his face or his physique. One in every of JCVD’s nice strengths is that it empowers Van Damme to play somebody his personal age, somebody with wrinkles and leathery pores and skin and baggage of all selection, somebody who bears the scars of rejection, dependancy and melancholy.
Van Damme is exhausted on an existential degree in JCVD. Fame has given him the whole lot and brought the whole lot. It made Van Damme a global movie star and a joke.
When JCVD opens, Van Damme has been simply scraping by for years. He’s grinding out low-cost autos for the streaming and direct-to-DVD market. He’s not as quick or as versatile as he as soon as was. He misses his marks and is dismissed and disparaged by his personal director. And he’s locked in a painful custody dispute along with his ex-wife over their daughter, who needs to reside along with her mom relatively than her well-known dad.
The Insufferable Weight of Large Expertise offers its deeply flawed protagonist a daughter as effectively. If you wish to humanize an enormous movie star in a movie like this I suppose there’s no higher manner than by giving them a daughter to disappoint.
Then issues get actually unhealthy. The fictionalized Van Damme is sucked right into a messy financial institution theft/hostage state of affairs and within the confusion and dysfunction the police, the press and the general public come to assume that he’s one of many financial institution robbers and never an harmless bystander trapped in a state of affairs that grows extra harmful and heated by the minute.
JCVD has a-chronological timeline that bounces manically between the hostage state of affairs and Van Damme’s life main as much as it. Van Damme’s private {and professional} life symbolize a gauntlet of humiliations.
Steven Seagal solely wants to chop off his pony-tail to steal a task from Van Damme. His new movies are so low-cost that his nonetheless sizable wage leaves valuable little left within the funds for manufacturing values or identify actors, roughly making certain that they’ll be interchangeable RedBox merchandise relatively than work that he may be pleased with.
Like a pre-comeback Cage, Van Damme made so many unhealthy movies that audiences started to neglect that he was even able to making good ones. Additionally like Cage, the overall thought of JCVD is to drop an eccentric real-life action icon into one in every of their late-period autos in a manner that feedback on the peculiar nature of their late-period fame particularly and the tragicomedy of being a star usually.
JCVD opens with a really lengthy, seemingly uninterrupted take (I say seemingly as a result of I understand how filmmakers are with their tips and dishonest and utilizing the magic of cinema to confuse us) the place a clearly drained and unenthusiastic Van Damme punches and kicks and battles his manner via a small military of heavies.
He’s an expert however he’s additionally clearly seen his higher days. He’s not the magnificent bodily specimen he as soon as was and he doesn’t hit all of his marks however when he complains to his director he’s blown off as a prima donna who nonetheless thinks he’s working with John Woo when he’s churning out crap for the house video market.
It’s a outstanding sequence that epitomizes the movie’s unrelenting give attention to Van Damme as an actor and human being in addition to a person of action. There’s a cause they’re referred to as action heroes relatively than appearing heroes however in JCVD Van Damme doesn’t simply act. He ACTS! He emotes! He performs heart-wrenching monologues. It’s maybe the primary time a Jean Claude Van Damme movie could possibly be despatched to members of the Academy with “For Your Consideration” on the backside of the display screen and have it not be seen as a joke.
Van Damme acts like he’s by no means acted earlier than in JCVD however in lots of my favourite scenes he simply exists onscreen. He doesn’t must do something: can simply be himself and it’s completely riveting.
There are consequently two components of JCVD. There’s the maybe excessively fashionable action movie element, the place a person who looks like something however a hero in his personal life known as upon to defeat actual criminals. Then there’s the darkly humorous, completely revealing character research facet the place Van Damme takes a protracted, arduous look within the mirror and displays powerfully and poetically on the lengthy, unusual journey that has been his private {and professional} life.
That’s the topic of the well-known six minute lengthy monologue late within the movie’s first act the place its star faces us straight and, with tears in his eyes and uncooked emotion in his voice, tries to make sense of his life.
JCVD is just not a delicate movie. It’s massive and broad and operatic in its outsized feelings but it surely works. The opening and the monologue shamelessly name consideration to themselves and beg to be singled out for reward however additionally they should be singled out for reward.
The character research facet of JCVD is way extra compelling than the style stuff however even when JCVD is uneven it’s nonetheless an audacious and revelatory experiment that illustrates that Van Damme can do extra than simply combat and do the splits: he can act his ass off as effectively when given the chance and no movie has ever given Van Damme an opportunity to behave the best way that this one does, even those the place he performs equivalent twins (sure, there’s a couple of).
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