JCVD is the movie where Jean-Claude van Damme tells us what it's like to be Jean-Claude van Damme. This happens mostly in a schizophrenic scene where the camera pans out of frame and shows the lighting equipment positioned above the set. Jean-Claude magically levitates upward with the camera (in film this is called a "metaphor": we are going "up" into his "brain-thoughts"), and delivers a 6-minute monologue about what it's like to be a 13 year-old karate champion with a singular dream to be a movie star. He also says some utterly incomprehensible shit, and then he starts to cry.
The best part of the film is that there's a guy running around who looks just like John Cazale in Dog Day Afternoon, and he gets shot in the forehead, just like John Cazale in Dog Day Afternoon. I'm not sure this had much to do with JCVD, but Dog Day Afternoon is pretty boss...so bravo!
There's really nothing surprising here: JCVD only succeeds in confirming that once we strip away the action-star cliches that have come to define van Damme, all we find is another layer of even less interesting I'm-just-a-regular-guy cliches.
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