Double the Van Dammage: Double Impact (1991) and Double Team (1997)

I've watched a bunch of Jean-Claude Van Damme films recently. Who knows why. However, these are two of the best. Keep an eye out for more Van Damme double features in the future, because I haven't gotten sick of this guy yet.

Double Impact (1991)

Van Damme really stretches the acting muscles in this one by playing identical twins, separated since childhood because their parents were murdered by hoodlums in Hong Kong. This film firmly sides with nurture over nature, as the two children grow up to be way different: goober Chad runs a martial arts school in LA with his uncle and enjoys wooing the ladies with his small neon shirts, while Alex is a criminal living in Hong Kong, unwittingly working for the man who had his parents killed and going steady with his girlfriend, Danielle. Chad is duped by his uncle into traveling to the island to meet up with his long-lost brother, and from there a lot of weird things happen. Of course, Chad is mistaken for Alex and Alex is mistaken for Chad: such is life, and life is a constant struggle. This creates all manner of conflicts between the brothers and their Triad adversaries, not to mention Danielle, who takes quite a liking to Chad. This leads to two things: one is an absolutely disturbing love scene between Danielle and Chad, and the other is a fight between Chad and Alex, and it's not bad. In fact, Double Impact has more than a few decent fight scenes, including one between Alex and Moon, played by Bolo Yeung (you know him as the big guy in Bloodsport). The dopey comedy gets to be a bit much by the end, but it's a competent Van Damme vehicle with some so-so choreography. Not exactly fine dining, but still, satisfying nonetheless.

*I don't want to spoil this for you.

Double Team (1997)

This movie is 1997 through and through. It makes no sense at all. In another tale of unlikely partners, Van Damme plays Jack, an assassin, who meets up with an arms dealer, Yaz, played by Dennis Rodman. Yaz supplies Jack with weapons for his final mission. When Jack fails to eliminate the target, he is sent to an island for retired assassins, where they play golf and such. The island is heavily fortified and monitored, but Jack's pretty tough, so he manages to escape after a bit of training, mainly by doing curls with the bathtube tied around his neck. Once he finds his way back to society, Jack teams up with Yaz to rescue his wife, who has been kidnapped by the nefarious Stavros. Putting aside the weirdness of it all for a moment, this film has no sense of a proper dramatic arc. Jack's escape from the failed assassin's retirement home/prison feels like one film, and his quest for revenge against Stavros feels like another. This is not to say that I expect a delicate emotional narrative from a Van Damme movie, but even something as monumentally silly as Double Impact keeps a nice pace and pays everything off at the end. Double Team has so many ideas crammed into 90 minutes that they all get shortchanged as a result. However, Double Team has many redeeming qualities, including: Rodman's outfits, Rodman's dialogue, Van Damme's dialogue, that part where Van Damme spin-kicks a tiger, and product placement so blatant it almost seems subversive*. Van Damme's fight scenes are ruined by the convulsive editing, so I can't recommend Double Team on those grounds, but if you enjoy the absurd, this isn't terrible.