For a time in the early nineteen-nineties, a young moviegoer could have been forgiven for thinking that the best way to win a fight would be to do a full split and then deploy a flying, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree roundhouse kick—to at once stun your opponent with your athletic grace and knock him out cold with your foot. That potentially dangerous misconception owed almost entirely to the popularity of Jean-Claude Van Damme, the so-called Muscles from Brussels, the slight but ripped action star who jump-kicked his way through such global hit movies as “Bloodsport,” “Universal Soldier,” and “Timecop.” He had what the era wanted in a second-tier action hero: a square jaw, perfect abs, and a delightfully indecipherable way of speaking English. Yet he also, mostly with a pair of sad eyes, brought a measure of depth to even his most ridiculous roles, as when he played a Quebecois firefighter who has to foil a terrorist plot and save his children during a hockey game in the “Die Hard” cosplay “Sudden Death.” But, as always happens, tastes changed, Van Damme got older, and recently, if you’ve seen him, it has mostly been in straight-to-streaming rehashes of his greatest hits.
That’s the state in which we find Van Damme in the première of the new Amazon series “Jean-Claude Van Johnson”—wealthy, washed-up, and bored, living in an architectural monstrosity in Malibu, riding a Segway in his bathrobe to get the newspaper, microwaving Pop-Tarts for breakfast, and being confused with Val Kilmer at a restaurant. That changes when Van Damme, or the version of himself that he plays in the show, decides to get back in the game, meeting with his agent (played by Phylicia Rashad) to make a plan to jumpstart his career. But what career is that, exactly? It turns out that his years of appearances in lousy B-movies shot in odd locations around the world were just a cover for his real job, as a black-ops assassin: code name Johnson. He is quickly given an assignment to infiltrate a drug cartel in Bulgaria, while ostensibly filming a very bonkers modern reimagining of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
The “Jean-Claude Van Johnson” pilot made a splash when it first appeared, in August of 2016, earning a full-series order from Amazon. Van Damme gamely skewers his own faded fame, and pokes fun at the physical gimmicks that helped make him a star. Yet the full series, run by Dave Callaham and directed by Peter Atencio, is a weird ride, living in an uneasy space of parody, satire, homage, and straight-ahead drama. At times, it is an insidery Hollywood farce, mocking the pretension of action-movie actors and deluded auteurs. At other times, it leans hard into the very genre elements it makes fun of—with punny dialogue, wooden acting, overwrought romance, and airless pacing interrupted with bursts of blood and explosions. And, at still some other level, it is a consideration of the ideas of persona and fame, capturing Van Damme’s displacement in the new Hollywood world of comic-book blockbusters, with no room for the R-rated antics of his ilk. In one memorable scene, two different versions of Van Damme, from different moments in time, playing on the conceit of his biggest hit, “Timecop,” appear in the same place, with one telling the other, “You tried to fill your emptiness with fame, and it didn’t work. You have a big hole in your heart, because you don’t think that you will ever be loved.” You can admire the show’s insistent devotion to its own concept while also thinking that Amazon has more money than it knows how to spend.
The novelty of all this madness is undercut by the fact that Van Damme did something similar nearly a decade ago, in the film “JCVD,” in which he played himself as an aging, washed-up, self-aware former movie star who returns to his home town, in Belgium, and gets caught up in a bank robbery. Yet, at fifty-seven, Van Damme, who in real life attributes the derailing of his career to bad marriages and a drug problem, is still a compelling presence. He has the look shared by the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone—still remarkably fit, but with skin tanned and stretched to leather, and the whole package seemingly held together by a combination of desperate hard work, untold chemical compounds, and the spit and glue of show biz. It all adds up to a kind of pathos, but also wisdom—again, mostly seen in the eyes—of a man who went from obscure martial artist to top-billed star and then to what must feel like an extended purgatory, with the passing of time making every flying kick not just harder to execute but also more plainly ridiculous.
Other ex-action stars, bereft of the big screen, have dealt with the onset of late middle age by attempting to meddle in the workings of the real world. Chuck Norris, who earnestly kicked his own way through the eighties and nineties, has become a right-wing political activist. In 2012, before the Presidential election, he recorded a video with his wife, warning evangelicals of the scourge of socialism, and saying, “We’re at a tipping point and quite possibly our country as we know it may be lost forever.” This August, he endorsed the Senate candidacy of Roy Moore. Steven Seagal, another martial artist turned thespian, took an even wider view. First, he became a “reserve deputy sheriff” for a reality show called “Steven Seagal: Lawman,” in which he participated in real police action in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, and then in Maricopa County, Arizona, which was Joe Arpaio’s old stomping grounds. More recently, he has become a trusted confidante of Russian President Vladimir Putin, publicly supporting the annexation of Crimea, in 2014, and saying, of Putin, “he is one of the greatest world leaders, if not the greatest world leader, alive today.” Last year, as news of Russia’s meddling in the U.S. election broke, Seagal became a Russian citizen.
Van Damme, too, has cozied up to Putin over the years, making public appearances with him at a bare-knuckle boxing match and other events in Russia. And last October, in an interview with TMZ conducted outside a restaurant while he was holding his small dog, Van Damme said, among other things, that the next President of the United States needed to “have a vodka with Mr. Putin” and “try to make peace.” He then downplayed the attention being paid to Donald Trump’s use of the phrase “grab ’em by the pussy,” and said, though he loves his “brother Muslims,” “right now, we need Donald Trump.” In that video, and in other public moments, Van Damme has had the appearance of a man who still takes himself quite seriously. This makes his self-deprecating performance in “Jean-Claude Van Johnson” seem perhaps less like an honest interrogation of his career than like an attempt at a comeback, with whatever tools he has left. Yet what is a dignified afterlife for an international man of action, formerly beloved for his ability to save the world? Only Schwarzenegger, as the two-term governor of California, got his hands on any real geopolitical power. Then he went back to playing the Terminator.
