JCVD

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Comebacks are big news these days. Some actors, like Julia Roberts for example, have hardly been away long enough to warrant calling their latest work a ‘comeback’. In the case of Jean-Claude Van Damme, he never even went away … we just stopped paying attention to him.

He’s been churning out straight-to-DVD films on a fairly consistent basis since he fell off the big screens round about the time of Maximum Risk (1996) As with Bruce Campbell’s My Name is Bruce (with which this film would make an entertaining double-feature) this is a B Movie Legend having a pre-emptive pop at his own work.

The film weaves together two narrative threads, one in the present tense and one in the past tense leading up to the present. In the flash-backs we see JCVD’s career on the rocks. He has lost custody of his young daughter and loses a film job to his arch nemesis, Steven Seagal. His misery is palpable and one feels the genuine heart-felt nature of this self-critique (well, until a spot of research reveals that ole J-C doesn’t have a daughter, just an adult son).

Against this rather glum background, he stops off at village post-office to draw out some money, is turned down by the teller and gets himself caught up in a heist. The police descend on the post-office, hotly pursued by the media, keen to cover the story of the disenfranchised movie-star who has gone off his rocker and taken hostages.

These early scenes, where we’re not sure quite what is going on, are deftly, teasingly handled and make the film most engaging. I don’t think it’s too shocking a spoiler to reveal that J-C isn’t really the bank-robber, but rather a hostage as well, one who his captors treat rather like a performing seal, getting him to perform his kicking-a-cigarette-out-of-your-mouth trick for their amusement. Throughout these scenes, J-C is passive, restrained, almost submissive … he is so depressed by where his life has taken him he doesn’t even have the will to fight two bad-guys whose collective intelligence is slightly lower than that of a sponge.

The lighting is cold and sullen, the music mournful and bluesy, the humour bitter. Essentially this multi-millionaire world-famous movie-star is asking we poor working stiffs to feel sorry for him. Well, at least he does have the common decency to parody his image and his own work but, as when Schwarzenegger did this with The Last Action Hero (1993) one feels compelled to wonder what his actual fans make of this “Sorry I’ve been taking your money and turning out such shit films all these years” confessional.

This movie is shot through with a knowing post-modern sense of self-analysis … never-more-so than in the much-talked-about soliloquy, where he turns to the camera and addresses the viewer directly, pouring his heart out in jumbled, incoherent, half-finished thoughts that were clearly un(der)rehearsed. This is a cry from the heart, with him bemoaning his betrayal of the simple, pure principals of his Martial Art, judging his achievements as being hollow and discussing the confusion he feels in just being himself. He is, in other words, having his mid-life crisis on screen.

Well, I wish he’d had it earlier because this is the most entertaining I’ve seen he being since Hard Target (1993) This is not a film in which he stars, it’s a film in which he acts. Despite all the doubt on show, he obviously knew what he wanted – and he got it – a chance to make his peace with himself and prove that he doesn’t have to keep making and re-making the same unambitious plodding action fodder.

The question is: where will his career go from here? Is this just an aberration before returning to the comfort, and guaranteed income of B-movies, or will he pursue this far-more experimental, far-more-interesting, doubtless far-less-lucrative path?

Myself, I hope it’s the latter, but a glance at IMDB suggests that his next film will be Universal Soldier 3 … Ah well. His comeback was nice while it lasted.

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Directed by: Mabrouk El Mechri
Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme & loads of other people of whom you’ve never heard.
Dur: 97 mins

Cert: 15
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TAKEN

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The Film:

Oddly, even though this film has already hit our DVD shelves, it has yet to make its debut even on the big screen in America. For the time being here in good ole Blighty, you can rent it on DVD or Blu Ray exclusively at y’r friendly neighbourhood Blockbuster.

If you’ve ever seen its fish-hook trailer, you’ll know the basic set-up. Neeson plays an ex-CIA agent who has given up his career to try and be a better father to his spoiled 17-year-old brat of a daughter, Kim. She goes on holiday to Paris, rings him up when she gets there and is promptly kidnapped, which he hears over the phone. He swears to her kidnappers that he will hunt them down and kill them. Which is exactly what he does.

The appeal of the film turns entirely on Neeson’s performance during this key scene. The pain, rage and hard-eyed determination which flash across his face as he hears her kidnap, is an exemplary piece of acting and draws the viewer wholly into his world. At least for a while.

So, it’s a fantasy. A rescue fantasy. Every daughter’s dream of the perfect dad, who will stop at nothing to save her if she’s in trouble. Accordingly, once he arrives in Paris, he pretty-much Jack Bauers everyone who gets in his way. However, the world his investigations lead him into is a dank, dark, disturbing vision of a man-made Hell … the sex slave trade, depicted in a way which, almost accidentally, makes you as uncomfortable in your complacency as Joel Schumacher’s much under-rated 8MM did deliberately back in 1999.

And there-in lies the film’s problem, for me. If Kim had been kidnapped by one of her dad’s old enemies bent on revenge, or as part of a government conspiracy, or by a camp French archaeologist who wanted to put her in a dress, or in any way befitting a rescue fantasy, then this film could have emerged as a kinetic, powerful, brilliantly executed entry into the action genre.

But, instead, we have these superhero fight scenes and James Bond chases set against a background which depicts, in chilling, disturbing detail, one of the greatest evils in the real world.

The background and the foreground just don’t go together. They don’t belong in the same diegesis.

The world of pale, emaciated, near-corpses chained to beds, drugged into incoherence and raped every few minutes until they eventually die is portrayed so convincingly, you just can’t believe in the heroics of Super Dad. You wonder about the girls he leaves behind, still chained-up. You think about their families. You become sadly aware that any world which could invent such atrocity and suffer it to exist, has no room for such super-heroics.

After which, the dénouement becomes inevitable and irrelevant and, I have to say, more than a little ridiculous.

I can’t imagine this film will do any favours for the French tourist industry as it portrays Paris as an open sore, in which nasty and conspicuously foreign bad-guys thrive. The French writer and director take pains to cut their villains from stereotypically racist Eastern cloth, which allows them to wash their hands of any responsibility for this simplistic, highly-polished but ultimately distasteful attempt to exploit the international sex-trade by making an action-movie out of it.

The Disc:

I watched this on Blu-Ray. The sound is awe-inspiring, with bass notes which verge on the seismic. As for the extras, they aren’t very special. A standard-issue making-of is only interesting because it reveals that director, Morel, adopts the Robert Rodriguez method of film-making, by directing with the camera on his shoulder. He apparently shot every foot of this film himself.

There is also a pointless little five-minute package from the French premier of the movie followed by about twelve minutes of alternate camera-angles on the stunt scenes we’ve already seen.

The oddest and, given the text of the film, most distasteful extra is the Real Time Mission Intelligence feature, which allows you to keep a running count of all the people Neeson has killed and injured in the film (I won’t spoil the surprise, but it’s lots) interspersed with the occasional satellite map so you know just where in the world he is. That’s in case all the shots of Paris don’t give you sufficient clues, I guess.
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Directed by: Pierre Morel
Written by: Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen
Starring Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Framke Janssen, Arben Bajraktaraj
Cert 15
93 mins

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image © 20 Century Fox
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