JCVD

What's Good About It

You have to like a movie that decides to work in a self-referential frame, where the main guy playing Jean-Claude Van Damme is Jean-Claude Van Damme. The film proceeds under the fiction that the JCVD we see on the screen really is the Belgian film star, who happens to get involved with a bank robbery.

The non-linear narrative where we see JCVD's entrance into the Post Office twice is effective and the flashbacks to different points in time are more poignant as the story rolls on.

The pacing is good and at no time do you really feel "man, this is dragging on", but there really isn't much to the story anyway.

What's Bad About It

The guys who rob the bank are a trio of losers. They behave like something straight out of 'Dog Day Afternoon' with perhaps a lot less wit and as a consequence their demises are on the whole dissatisfying. Perhaps that's part of the script's theme as well where JCVD confesses his great disillusionment with stardom and life.

The trio are so bad that you just cannot see how they might get out of the situation, even with JCVD as hostage. Inexplicably, they make him take the fall for the job by making him talk to the police negotiator, but that is about it. One of them even has a hairstyle reminiscent of John Cazales' look from 'Dog Day Afternoon'.

The film might have been even better had the bank robbery villains had half the gusto of Johnny Depp's John Dillinger.

What's Interesting About It

Apart from the premise itself? It's surprisingly barren.

It's full of pithy observations like how most American movies bash up on Arabs and muslims except JCVD.

There's an observation made by one of the bank robbers that John Woo owes JCVD big time, but somehow let him down by forging ahead with his career. Without JCVD, he would "still be filming pigeons in Hong Kong". That was a funny line.

The jokes about Steven Seagal and his ponytail are mildly amusing.