Enlarge PeaceArch Entertainment And starring as himself …: Jean-Claude Van Damme in JCVD. By Harlan Jacobson, Special for USA TODAY Jean-Claude Van Damme — the guy who could clock a tank with his foot — has gone New Age.
“I came out of action movies without too much depth,” he says. “I was going on the ground the path of kicking butt, and that’s it. Now I found in movies something I can believe in, which I never understood before.”
That’s hard to tell from the shot that opens JCVD, his current film now playing in limited release. It comes on like typical Van Damme, only toned down to look like a video pinball game. He’s wiping out a tyrant’s army coming at him with various weapons, then he drags an innocent victim to safety and into the real film that JCVD becomes: a meditation on middle-age failure by a washed-up action hero.
“I thought to impress my parents out of love, to affect myself with my own dreams and my friends by going to America to become a S-T-A-R, a star,” he says. “Frankly, I’ve been there, and there’s nothing there.”
Van Damme famously brought John Woo to Hollywood with Hard Target in ‘93, but in this film he’s furious at a brat of a Hong Kong director and throws darts at a photo of the Hollywood sign.
As JCVD unspools, this soldier of misfortune can’t seem to elude his fans even in his hick hometown in Belgium, where he has come to hide; even his ATM disses him with an “Account Frozen” cover. Then in that place’s the ex-wife hauling him into flattering attention back in Los Angeles — and using his kickboxer DVDs as evidence against him.
It all sounds a lot like the life Van Damme led. His career collapsed over the past 20 years, but his global following never did.
“People want to know what Van Damme is,” he says. “I’m a mass-audience scarecrow. When I go to Russia or Brazil, the people all arrive en masse, because I’m a guy from the people who made me famous, not the papers or the studios.”
But in the USA, he was always No. 2 to Arnold Schwarzenegger. And director Mabrouk El Mechri, a 30-year-old French-Algerian Parisian, decided the great Van Damme needed a comeback.
The only way to do that was tell the truth. That’s what Van Damme was thinking, too.
“I said to Mabrouk, ‘If I’m going to die, can I at least puke out my guidebook?’ It’s of a mankind who goes from nowhere to follow his dream to go to the screen.”
Of his later career splat, Van Damme says, “I had to leave those low-budget companies to come back as myself. Not as JEAN CLAUDE VAN DAMMMMME. I still want energy, but there has to be truth.”
He says he watched JCVD three times over a number of weeks, but it took a long time to process.
“The first time I saw it, instead of feeling the truth of it, I felt naked, internally naked. I left the screening and was disturbed for a couple of days. I decided to look at it again. I don’t look at my movies besides than two times, to be honest with you. I get bored. The second time it was painful. The third part time — I saw it with Mabrouk — I sententious precept it technically, how he was shooting, cutting, and the music. Very nice!”
Now Van Damme is cutting his new movie, Full Love. “I’m severe very fast, because I want to make Cannes,” he says. “It will be very dangerous for me. What I’m going to say in this movie is going to be very controversial.”
In the middle of the movie, the action is going to stop, he says. “An animal is going to talk. It’s going to be very strong and powerful. It’s the only solution.”
The animal, it seems, has something to say about what humans have done to the planet.
“Full Love will not save the world, of course,” he says. “But it’s a way of putting my fist on the table. Maybe it will exist badly received. Maybe people will say ‘I hate this shore, he’s a crazy moron.’ And a couple of days later, hopefully they will assert that animal’s message is the only solution.”
Asked about whether there will be a Universal Soldier 3, and to what degree it will be different with the new Van Damme, he says, “I’m very scared of US3. It’s a very expensive script, and I don’t think the circulating medium is there for it. It should be simpler with lots of heart.”
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