Last week I wrote about 1992’s Under Siege, a film in which Steven Seagal solved the problem of being a mediocre (at best) actor by surrounding himself with much better actors thus producing a film that is really quite good (for a mindless nineties action flick).
A year earlier, Jean-Claude Van Damme opted for a different strategy and instead decided to elevate his own credentials by appearing in a movie in which everyone else was a much worse actor, and casting himself in not one, but two leading roles. It sort of works in that he is pretty much the best thing about the movie (twice over) but that doesn’t necessarily mean that either of his performances is particularly good and the notion of Van Damme playing twin brothers, separated at birth, only to be reunited years later to avenge their parents’ death is exactly as mad as it sounds.
On any objective level, 1991’s Double Impact is not a good film, but when I saw it was available on a popular internet subscription service my curiosity was piqued – because I did remember rather enjoying it in my youth. And truthfully, the combination of nostalgia and the ‘so-bad-it’s-actually-good’ nature of the movie did result in 107 minutes of me being vaguely entertained.
Van Damme almost convinces as two distinct characters, although we do have to get past the bizarre notion that, although each ‘twin’ has experienced very different upbringings, one growing up in an orphanage in Hong Kong, the other raised by his deceased parents’ American bodyguard, they both somehow wind up being experts in martial arts and, more bizarrely, with identical French accents (well Belgian accents if we’re honest but the film would have us believe that they are French). This strange coincidence is explained by the fact that the Hong Kong orphan is brought up by French nuns and the other child is brought up by his American guardian in France. Logically neither of these facts would necessarily result in quite such a pronounced accent as Van Damme’s but I do admire the effort to add some credibility to an otherwise implausible plot.
Really though, there isn’t much plot to speak of, and action is the main selling point of this movie. And double the Van Dammes means double the action.
Except it doesn’t because there really is only so much action that can be crammed into the running time.
In reality, the novelty of two Van Dammes wears off after a while and this is really just another ‘by the numbers’ second-rate nineties action flick. In Bolo Yeung and Corrina Everson are two performers who might have made great Bond baddies, but there’s nothing much else on offer.
Probably only worth watching for reasons of nostalgia, if you watched it back in the nineties, and even then with the expectation that it won’t be as good as you remembered it being.
James Proclaims! 