FILM REVIEW – JCVD (2008)
A film that surprises on just about every level, not least in giving a brilliant performance from its central actor / character Jean-Claude vane Damme, playing himself (the title being his initials).
The star of many lame brained action movies in which he proved to be so wooden, here gives an Oscar worthy if at times rather embittered portrayal of him.
On seeing the posters for this I expected a self-parody comparable to Bruce Campbell’s My Name Is Bruce, but JCVD, though it has some humorous moments, is primarily intensely serious, and even tragic.
His Hollywood career in tatters, and financially flat-lined by a bitter divorce settlement in which his wife has gained custody of his daughter, JCVD returns to his native Brussels, where the locals still venerate him as a national hero. Finding that his credit cards won’t work, JCVD goes to the post office to find himself caught up in an ongoing hostage crisis. Three thieves have the staff and many customers, including children, hostage, and soon take the movie hero in to add to their midst.
Matters are complicated by JCVD being the last person entering the Post Office before the authorities realize that there is a crime going on. They assume he is responsible for it and act accordingly. The robbers quickly blackmail him into acting as their spokesman by threatening to kill a child who is among the hostages.
JCVD negotiates with the police siege experts, and exploits the situation to have some money transferred to his alimony settlements account.
He makes virtually no effort to use his cinematic heroics, (we see them parodied only in the opening credit sequence). The leader of the crooks is clearly deranged (the film has been influenced by Dog Day Afternoon), and one of his men idolizes JCVD, and talks to him a lot. JCVD manages to manipulate him into releasing a hostage as a good will gesture to the police, but the leader intervenes and insists that it should be the mother of the child, rather than the boy, to ensure that she won’t give the cops too much information. The scene in which the hysterical mother is separated from her son and thrown out of the post office is genuinely harrowing.
JCVD goes into a melancholy mood, and offers an astonishing totally improvised and heart-felt six-minute soliloquy to the audience about the decline of his career, and losing a lucrative role to Steven Segal (who gained publicity by shaving off his pony-tail for the first time in his career). The scene was shot in a single take.
The film has a tremendous parody of the Gaomont Studios logo presentation where instead of a silhouetted child handing a silhouetted man a flower, the man has to kung fu the kid to get it off him.
When JCVD manages to manipulate one crook into recognizing that there is no escape and that he should release the hostages, (getting most of them an escape route0, the crooks fall out among themselves and all but one is killed. The last takes JCVD as a hostage and human shield, threatening to shoot him. JCVD imagines taking him down with movies style karate, and gaining much public acclaim for his heroics. When seen for real, he barely manages to elbow the man and the police deal with him instead, with JCVD now arrested and put on trial for being their leader. He does go to prison for the embezzlement act of transferring money to his divorce lawyers, and while in prison (running a karate school for the prisoners0, he gets visited by his wife and daughter, with a glimmer of hope of some reconciliation. In reality, JCVD has an estranged son, and the daughter plot was substituted for legal reasons.
A thoughtful, deep film in the Jean-Luc Godard, Francois
Truffaut tradition, extremely intense at times and with a jaw droopingly good
central performance by its central hero, playing as a human, rather than a
martial arts manikin.
Arthur Chappell
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