Movie star Jean-Claude Van Damme (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is filming a difficult scene where he has to despatch with a group of heavies all in one long take, but it is not all going to plan and at the end of one scene which cannot be used when part of the scenery gives way, he goes over for an argument with the director who is not willing to listen to him. Van Damme's private life is no less fraught with turmoil, as he is fighting for custody of his daughter with his ex-wife, and needs cash to pay his lawyer's fees. So how does he wind up back in Belgium, holding up a post office?
Well, he doesn't really, though he is in Belgium when that situation kicks off. The lines between the real Van Damme and the movie version of him are blurred here, in a film that could easily have been the star's very own Last Action Hero, though this is a more artistically successful work. From some angles, JCVD could have been viewed as his very own art movie as it ponders precisely how an action movie performer would react when plonked down into the kind of set-up that his fictional alter egos could have handled with a few well-placed boots to the head.
Naturally, the pretence of realism would have flown out of the window if he had started with the martial arts acrobatics, but director and co-writer Mabrouk El Mechri is not after a simple remake of Dog Day Afternoon with Van Damme in the Al Pacino role, for as we presently find out he is not robbing the post office after all. All signs have pointed to it, and that is what the police and crowd of pro-Van Damme supporters think he is up to, but this is all a misunderstanding. What has actually happened is that he demanded to be allowed in when he needed to get a money transfer to fund his lawyer, and ended up one of the hostages of the genuine robbers.
So for most of this Van Damme isn't the usual man of action we think we know, but really a morose and frustrated character. He has been thwarted in his attempts to appear in a proper Hollywood blockbuster, something he believes he deserves as he still makes profits for productions that shoot in Europe for sales all over the world - he's huge in Asia, we are assured - and he has been stopped from being with his daughter who is embarrassed by him, so when we join him he is not at a good stage in his career. How much of this background is the real Van Damme and how much has been invented for the camera is what we are left pondering.
Especially as it has to be said Van Damme is very good at playing himself. It's true that part of this was improvised for greater authenticity, but we never entirely swallow that what we are watching is anything other than a slightly lumbeirng hostage thriller that happens to have the novelty value that most other similar efforts do not. It's that novelty that saves it, however, as Van Damme as an action icon versus Jean-Claude as a person is what concerns the film as if the story has one foot in the hero camp and another in the more mundane, non-superpowered ordinary chap in an extraordinary business camp, prone to the same weaknesses as the rest of us.
This means that every so often someone will ask him about his films or for his autograph, then as an alternative we see that the movies he is famous for are a sham as far as believability goes because the real person behind them could simply not pull off the stunts and extravagant acts that the fictional version does. It may seem like stating the obvious, but it's a brave step for an actor whose income relies on those fictions, and he has a six-minute monologue near the end where he opens his heart in a way that in undeniably self-serving, but curiously endearing. You want to congratulate Van Damme for this, he may never make another one like it but it's far more experimental than anything his peers would have done. It feels honest even if it's as made-up as his other entertainments. Music by Gast Waltzing.
