Double Team
After directing
many of the definitive Jet Li films in Hong Kong, Hark Tsui
devised a plan to go to Hollywood and get kicked back out as fast as
possible. But the twist is he would also
stick them with a second movie before the reviews for the first one came
in. Fuck, this guy’s life is way better
than that bullshit movie The Prestige.
He took on what had to be a sure fail project with guns blazing.
I guess some
screenwriter heard about how Dennis Rodman managed to cheat on Carmen Electra
during their honeymoon and figured he must have amazing sneaky powers because I
don’t know about you guys, but any romantic trip I’ve ever taken with a woman
we’ve never been out of each other’s sight any time other than closing the
bathroom door, and that’s just for number 2.
So whoever wrote this figured Rodman belonged in a spy movie and I guess
that’s a good choice of genre, but it still begs the question: why write a
movie for Dennis Rodman? I mean, if this
movie wasn’t written for Rodman, then the screenwriters more than earned their
salaries re-writing it for him so that his character is obsessed with punk
self-styling and speaks in lines of dialogue are all references to his
basketball career. But I’m sure if
Rodman had not taken the role they probably would’ve re-written the part for
Tommy Lee to make all his dialogue references to drumming and enormous penises.
“The best
offence is a good defence but I need to get off the bench.”
would change to:
“You only need
one stick to make good beat, if it’s long enough.”
“I hate
practice, but I never miss twice!”
would change to:
“I never fail
anything, not even an AIDS test!”
It’s a good
thing Rodman felt flattered enough by this screenplay to take the gig.
Jean-Claude
Van Damme is a good choice for the lead role because
you’re probably better off to be drunk while making something like this, but
seeing as the role involves talking, I’m guessing they had Mel Gibson in
mind. Van Damme
took this role on the sole conditions that he get to
hump a bathtub onscreen and that they name the film after his girlfriend at the
time, folk pop singer Jewel.
The
plot involves Van Damme playing an agent of Megaforce. We learn
from the opening scene that he is on his last assignment before a retirement to
a lavish seaside estate in the South of France.
Like all employers, Megaforce pays its
employees enough that they can save up and retire to luxury even while they are
still able-bodied and of use to the organization. I’m glad most employers are nice like that, I can’t imagine a world where organizations would pay
you just more than enough to get by but not enough that you could ever leave
before they were done getting every bit of work possible out of you.
Megaforce is a lot cooler than British Intelligence. Those buggers always give James Bond a hard
time about his professional style. But Megaforce actually demands that one man go out on his own
and handle situations as recklessly and destructively as possible or else you
get reverse Nikita’d, or you get pushed across
The Point Of No Return in the opposite direction. Because your death is faked and when you wake
up, you are no long a top spy assassin.
Van Damme gets talked back out of retirement
for one more mission only to discover that he has gotten a little soft in all
his retirement years which he spends taking a shower with a bathing suit on and
fighting his wife’s rooster sculptures in the South France. He displays 98% balls on the job and that’s
not enough so Megaforce sends him off to Pussy
Island, a Zardoz style prison colony for
espionage failures.
Van Damme cuts his thumb off, fucks his bathtub with intense
vigour (Jewel must be stronger than I gave her credit for), and escapes. He needs to find his old arms dealer buddy,
Dennis Rodman and since he’s into kinky sex and punky
styles he lives in that European city that starts with an ‘A’ and is famous for
its red light district, that’s right….Antwerp in Belgium! Actually, that must’ve been Van Damme’s other condition for doing this movie:
-Let
me fuck a bathtub.
-Name
the film after my girlfriend’s body.
-Film
some part of it in my country so my cousin can pay for his wedding.
What
a demanding motherfucker. No wonder they
never made Street Fighter 2: Turbo: The Movie 2:
Turbo Alpha.
The
rest of the film is prettymuch just an ever
tightening clusterfuck of logic defying madness that
I can’t even begin to describe. It’s
kind of like when you try to remember a dream or something but all you get is
these crazy disconnected moments. There
was one wacky part where Van Damme makes it into this
room and a crazy bald assassin guy is sitting there calmly with his back to the
door and then springs up and starts throwing his shoes at Van Damme; a wacky courtyard sequence involving way too many
moving parts for me to follow; there’s some childbirth; some more weird
fighting; top secret hacker monks. I
don’t think watching the movie a again or even being able to take the Strange
Days machine and enter the minds of the screenwriters would make the flow
of these events any more clear to me.
It
all leads up to climax (?). The film
doesn’t really establish that Van Damme’s character
has a phobia of tigers, coliseums, crosses, and landmines but that must be the
case because his nemesis has constructed this situation purely for Van Damme’s torment. In
case I didn’t mention this earlier, the bad guy is played by Mickey Rourke using Jason Statham levels of lube. When you study martial arts they teach you
that in any fight, anything you bring in can be used against you, so just bring
your body. Rourke
brings his crosses, tigers, and landmines and they all end up getting used
against him. The lesson is to bring a
chocolate bar to a fight.
I
think this film successfully incorporates the silly culture of 1990s x-treme sports guys into an action movie and Double Team
is more like what I was hoping of from Vin Diesel’s xXx,
but then again, I would have liked it if Asia Argento
had shown up in this movie. So I guess
we can all learn from each other.
There’s
really no way to interpret this film except as a practical joke. And as such, I think it’s a really fucking
funny one.
Hark Tsui,
you’ve made a monkey out of me!
If you liked this, check out
these other related readings:
This is my attempt at writing an adventure fantasy movie.
DEBS: They’re Crime-Fighting Hotties
with Killer Bodies
May the Jordanafication and Brewsterization
of Hollywood continue.
Puppet sea life movie week
continues.