JCVD

Though it boasts a career-best performance from Jean-Claude Van Damme, JCVD is never quite able to hoist itself up to the level of its star – with the sporadically tedious storyline and relentlessly overblown visuals ranking high on the movie’s list of transgressions. Van Damme, playing himself, has returned to Belgium in an effort to get back to his roots, though it’s not long before the Muscles from Brussels finds himself caught up in an increasingly perilous hostage situation. Mabrouk El Mechri has infused JCVD with an aggressively irritating directorial style that effectively prevents one from fully connecting with the material, as the filmmaker, along with cinematographer Pierre-Yves Bastard, consistently places the emphasis upon grainy, needlessly washed-out visuals that are virtually headache-inducing in their ostentatiousness. Far more problematic, however, is the tired hostage-drama plot that feels as though it’d be perfectly at home within any number of the straight-to-video fare that Van Damme laments throughout the film’s running time, and it’s often impossible not to get the feeling that Mechri and co-scripter Frederic Benudis have simply shoehorned the erstwhile action star into a pre-existing screenplay. That being said, JCVD does possess more than a few elements designed to appeal to Van Damme’s more overtly ardent followers – with an emotional speech delivered directly into the camera at the film’s midway point an obvious highlight. And while one can’t help but get a kick out of several tongue-in-cheek references to Van Damme’s ailing career (eg the revelation that he lost a role to Steven Seagal after the portly actor agreed to chop off his ponytail), JCVD‘s inability to entirely live up to its promise would seem to indicate that the production would’ve benefited substantially from a more competent filmmaker behind the camera.

**1/2 out of ****