Thursday
Apr302009
Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 8:45PM DVD Review - 'JCVD'
Editor's note: I received a text message yesterday from my friend Christian. He's written a couple articles here in the past,
wrote a thing or two for Cinefex back in the day, and genuinely knows his stuff. The text message? "I take
back everything I ever said about Jean-Claude Van Damme. JCVD is awesome." Since JCVD is new to home video this week, I asked Christian to write a review.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve said unkind things about Jean-Claude Van Damme in the
past. For example, I remember the time he sat in the row directly in front of me at an opening night, Grauman’s
Chinese screening of Saving Private Ryan. My friends and I heckled him mercilessly, yelling, “Down in front,
Frenchy!” though we knew he hailed from Belgium.To Mr. Van Damme’s credit
(actually, Mr. Camille François Van Varenberg’s, and God, how I wish I’d known that at the time), “the Muscles from
Brussels” refrained from turning around and kicking our smart, chubby faces in.I once bad-mouthed him to his Hard
Target costar Yancy Butler: “He seems to have a knack for finding exactly the wrong syllables to stress,” I
remarked, to which Ms. Butler retorted that he was a better actor in English than she was in
French.Touché, Witchblade.
So it was with morbid curiosity that I rented JCVD, a French, mostly French-language
action movie starring said Muscles as J.C.V.D., aka Himself. I was lured by positive reviews from all over the
Intertubes, including a rave from Ain’t It Cool’s Vern, whose feelings may be encapsulated by his two-sentence
paragraph: “Holy shit, this is a real movie! They really made this!” See, JCVD is about an armed robbery at a
post office in Brussels, a robbery in which Jean-Claude Van Damme seems to be taking part—not a character played by
Van Damme, understand, but Van Damme himself. That’s more plausible given Van Damme’s off-screen woes, including a
memorably shady manager and an expensive child custody battle in Los Angeles.
| JCVD
Starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, François Damiens, and Zinedine Soualem  |
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve said unkind things about Jean-Claude Van Damme in the
past. For example, I remember the time he sat in the row directly in front of me at an opening night, Grauman’s
Chinese screening of Saving Private Ryan. My friends and I heckled him mercilessly, yelling, “Down in front,
Frenchy!” though we knew he hailed from Belgium.To Mr. Van Damme’s credit
(actually, Mr. Camille François Van Varenberg’s, and God, how I wish I’d known that at the time), “the Muscles from
Brussels” refrained from turning around and kicking our smart, chubby faces in.I once bad-mouthed him to his Hard
Target costar Yancy Butler: “He seems to have a knack for finding exactly the wrong syllables to stress,” I
remarked, to which Ms. Butler retorted that he was a better actor in English than she was in
French.Touché, Witchblade.
So it was with morbid curiosity that I rented JCVD, a French, mostly French-language
action movie starring said Muscles as J.C.V.D., aka Himself. I was lured by positive reviews from all over the
Intertubes, including a rave from Ain’t It Cool’s Vern, whose feelings may be encapsulated by his two-sentence
paragraph: “Holy shit, this is a real movie! They really made this!” See, JCVD is about an armed robbery at a
post office in Brussels, a robbery in which Jean-Claude Van Damme seems to be taking part—not a character played by
Van Damme, understand, but Van Damme himself. That’s more plausible given Van Damme’s off-screen woes, including a
memorably shady manager and an expensive child custody battle in Los Angeles.
Reader Comments (3)
Sounds like the Stath needs to hook up with El Mechri for a movie
I would be very interested in seeing that.
Saw it at TIFF and experienced much of the same as described above. From the great opening sequence to the moving, yes moving, raised platform direct to camera address, to the satisfying ending. Definitely worth a watch by fans of the muscles and not...