JCVD was my one-pointer. Hopefully there's a parallel universe where Van Damme received an Oscar nomination, in addition to a slew of other awards, for his vulnerable performance in the film, catapulting him back into the mainstream and rescuing him from the doldrums of direct-to-video fare that rarely capitalize on his talent and charisma. To anyone who says the man can't act, I present this
six-minute monologue in which Van Damme breaks the fourth wall to bare his soul to the viewer. Remove the impressively choreographed
long take during the opening credits and you essentially remove all action from the film.
JCVD is more akin to an extremely meta
Dog Day Afternoon than
Bloodsport or
Kickboxer. Van Damme, playing a fictionalized version of himself, is taken hostage at a Belgium post office by petty criminals whom the action hero would typically dispose of with a single roundhouse kick, but this isn't a movie set with pulled punches and guns equipped with blanks. This is the "real world," with real violence and life-or-death consequences. How does an action hero save the day when there's no script or second takes? I grew up idolizing the Muscles from Brussels and still consider him one of my favorite actors, so the blurring of reality and fiction in
JCVD likely hits harder for me than it would non-fans, especially with Van Damme exposing the naked vulnerabilities and real-life shortcomings beneath his on-screen persona; but this is a movie I would also highly recommend to people who wouldn't typically watch anything Van Damme related. Here he aims to roundhouse kick you in the soul, not the face.
As for the other one-pointers, I've seen seven in total. My favorite of those is
Riki-Oh, which is one of the most cartoonishly violent films I've ever watched. It's like a live-action
Fist of the North Star set within a prison.