DAMN! Look at Van Damme now!

In JCVD, Jean-Claude Van Damme is Jean-Claude Van Damme. Losing his roles to Steven Seagal and a custody battle over his young daughter, the international action hero is struggling to maintain relevancy on levels both professional and personal. But when Jean-Claude walks into a bank to withdraw his attorney fees and is suddenly in the thick of a heist, is the haggard superstar orchestrating the stickup? Or is he simply a hostage, as trapped by fame as he is by criminals, who happens to know a couple of take-down moves?

JCVD may not be the first meta-musclehead movie, but it's certainly the most surprising. Of all the rippled hunks bone-breaking their way through the last 20 years of action films, Jean-Claude Van Damme would seem to be the least self-aware. A bantam fighting cock, "The Muscles From Brussels" has postured, preened, and kickboxed his way through 30-plus movies, almost all of them dreadful. Never has he intimated he can act; never has he hinted that he's even in on the joke. Don't be fooled by its action-ready premise; JCVD isn't quite the latest kickboxing carousal from the Muscles from Brussels. It's something even better: a sad, seriocomic meta-movie that may recall BEING JOHN MALKOVICH or one of Charlie Kaufman's many other ontological curios in the minds of some viewers. But, while both JCVD and MALKOVICH examine the strangeness of celebrity through the lens of absurdist self-referential filmmaking, and both films choose a fascinating, quasi-alienating aesthetic of vibrantly muddy mid-tones, JCVD dresses its dankness in glaringly blown-out lighting effects that acknowledge a topsy-turvy world in which artifice sits just upon reality. It also assumes the opposition of its Kaufman counterpart by being the one to look at fame from within (which is ironic, since it isn't the one that features people entering an actor's head and peeping though his eyes). Buzzily hilarious, JCVD is a personal, deeply felt film. Van Damme's delivery of a Fellini-esque soliloquy about the angst of fame could've resulted in the action star coming across as a crybaby. Instead, the speech, in which he breaks the fourth wall and expresses his ironic frustrations, is revelatory and heartbreaking. It starts off with a bang: a four-minute tracking shot that follows the star as he's filming an absurdly overheated battle scene - Get the Uzi! Grab the machete! Toss the grenade! Set that extra on fire! - before ending with the perfect Murphy's Law capper. Maybe director/co-writer Mabrouk El Machri is proving his movie-geek bona fides but he quickly downshifts, showing Van Damme sitting in court, sighing as his ex-wife's lawyer proves the star's unfitness for child custody by reeling off the methods in which he has dispatched onscreen villains over the years. Cut to Brussels, where a disconsolate Van Damme drops into a bank branch office to make a withdrawal and is caught up in a real-life robbery. Outside in the street, the cops, the hostage negotiator (François Damiens), and the growing throngs are convinced the star has popped a screw and gone outlaw. Inside, the robbers can't believe their luck. The sadistic gang leader schemes how best to use their A-list hostage, while the inside man - a true fan - just wants Jean-Claude to demonstrate his high kick. It walks a tightrope of knowing parody, earning laughs from the inherent cognitive dissonance involved in movie stardom. Everyone keeps remarking that Van Damme's shorter than they expected; the locals criticize him in theory then turn into fawning idolators as soon as he's right there in front of them. The star, aware that he's reached his sell-by date, crumples with despair when he hears that Steven Seagal has cut off his ponytail to win a role they both coveted. The craziest thing? Van Damme proves that he's a pretty decent actor, at least when he's working in his native French. It might seem like has the easiest role in the world - he has to play himself as a terrible actor - but it's usually the easiest roles in the world that are the most demanding, and Van Damme plays his character with a dead-eyed weariness that is honestly very moving at times, particularly during a monologue late in the film where he expresses his frustrations at being nothing but a star of shitty action movies, and not even being good enough at that to justify the love he receives for it; in this scene, we see Jean-Claude Van Damme weep openly, and that is something that you just don't expect to see. No, it's not the best performance in the world, but it's also light-years beyond anything else we've ever seen from this actor, and since the very concept of JCVD hinges on Van Damme playing himself well as an incompetent, it's a weirdly exciting thing, too. This movie's greatest trick is that it's a highbrow treatment of a lowbrow subject (plus, the movie is spoken almost entirely in French), which is always good for a blast of irony. El Mechri shoots in a kind of metallic gray, which deliberately undercuts the plain, clean look of Van Damme's action films, but also invokes violence and hopelessness. He pulls off a neat trick toward the end, playing on Van Damme's status as a hero, but also calling attention to the film itself. Regardless of how anyone takes it, JCVD will definitely throw a new light on Van Damme as a celebrity; he seems like less of a joke now. In the movie, he appears tired and sad and frustrated, which makes him less a cartoon and more like a guy you'd like to share a beer with (he's more of a movie star). It may even cause a cult revival of old Van Damme films. Go and see this one. It may just surprise you just as it did me. An ass-kickin' 4 on my "Go See" scale.