JCVD

An art film bar none that poses as an post modern action mocumentary JCVD breaks the fourth wall early and often with superb results. Jean-Claude Van Damme walks into a hostage situation on a trip to Brussels and from the onset the police treat the matter like JCVD is the ringleader. Turns out the "muscles from brussels" has legal bills, might lose custody of his daughter in a heated court battle and he's lost his latest role to Steven Segal. "He cut his ponytail for the role," JCVD moans.
If you were a fan and just went in expecting to see a routine actioner you'll be blessed with a more subliminal kind of action. Director Mabrouk El Mechri plays with our expectations in a good way. With a kind of elliptical time frame we experience a non linear account of how the post office siege goes down. For instance the audience first sees Jean-Claude assisting in the botched robbery, but then as the events unfold we return from an interior view and see that Jean-Claude is being forced at gunpoint to acquiesce to the badguys, one of whom incidentally with his long stringy hair and ugly demeanor is a classic cinema baddie.
Perhaps the thing that makes JCVD such a fulfilling experience was the mea culpa by Van Damme that at once takes the audience out of the film while at the same time heightening the claustrophobic sense of hostage imprisonment. All of a sudden during the middle of a scene inside the post office Van Damme and the camera rise in the air until they are even (there's no ceiling) with the overhead lights. JCVD proceeds to bring on the emotions in a full face close-up tearful lament of his career and current situation. Minutes pass as Jean-Claude's soliloquy reveals the depth of his being. As silently as the diatribe began JCVD and the camera slowly lower to the floor and the scene resumes. You go into the film thinking they are going to goof you with a thriller inside a docu but then the real twist reveals startling truths about our own conceptions.