It’s 1988. You and your buddies are wearing your shredded Girbaud jeans and Ray Ban sunglasses and are ready to head out to the mall cineplex to catch an action movie. What’s it gonna be,Red HeatwithArnold Schwarzenegger,Red ScorpionwithDolph Lundgren, orAction JacksonwithCarl Weathers? Wait a minute; what’s this one?Bloodsport? And who’s this guy,Jean-Claude Van Damme? Hey, it’s about an army guy who also does martial arts. Looks gnarly. That’s the flick you choose. On your way out of the theater, you can’t stop talking about that dude with the accent. “Did you see him jump, like, 8 feet in the air and kick that other guy in the face?” “Man, how could he do the splits like that?” You’re hooked.
And that’s how the legend of “The Muscles from Brussels” began. Sure, it’s easy to look back on Van Damme’s filmography and dismiss him as just another cheesy star of the “vigilante-soldier-of-fortune-kick-‘em-in-the-butt” low budget movie genre, but it would be an unfair dismissal. The truth is that Van Damme is a master image craftsman who’s always known how to get noticed, how to build his own brand, and how to ride it all to the top without ever taking himself too seriously.
By the time he was 20, Brussels-born Van Damme had already amassed dozens of full-contact karate championship titles. No doubt inspired by the reigning American action star of the time,Chuck Norris, Van Damme saw an opening for himself in Hollywood, realizing he had the skills, youth, and looks to make an impact in the action film market. He also had something else that would appeal to moviegoers — the European physique factor that catapulted Austria-born Schwarzenegger to fame inConan the Barbarian.
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Van Damme’s ambition to get noticed was apparent from the beginning, as evidenced by his first U.S. onscreen appearance in 1984’s hip hop cult classic,Breakin’. 24-year-old Van Damme appears as a spectator in a Venice Beach crowd watching the film’s leads bust their moves, and you can’t miss him, standing out prominently in a black muscle shirt and shorts, flailing his massive arms and dancing his quads off. Wherever the camera goes, Van Damme is right there, doing whatever he can to get attention. Today, his antics in that sequence look almost comical, but Van Damme knew exactly what he was doing, and he didn’t care if he looked ridiculous. He was determined to be seen, and it’s this kind of savvy that would ensure it happened.
Van Damme parlayed that brief appearance into his first credited U.S. film role as a deadly Russian kickboxer in the 1985 schlock fest,No Retreat, No Surrender. Doing essentially a parody ofDolph LundgreninRocky IV, Van Damme doesn’t utter a single word in the film, but clearly has a field day mugging it up as the “awesome machine of annihilation” that destroys everything in his path. It’s also the first time American audiences got to see his title-winning fighting skills and signature splits. He went full throttle in this one, and it paid off, eventually earning him the lead in the film that would establish him as an action star, 1988’sBloodsport.
A campy martial arts romp,Bloodsportnonetheless works because Van Damme never takes himself completely seriously. He’s an army captain! He’s a kickboxer! He breaks bricks! He gets the girl! There are times when it seems like Van Damme is winking at the audience and playing it like he’s in a comedy, but that’s a big reason for the movie’s appeal. It’s a joyride, and Van Damme is the conductor. He received a Golden Raspberry nomination as Worst New Star for this one, but instead of hanging his head and retreating, he followed the “any publicity is good publicity” maxim and continued his ascent.
WithBloodsport, Van Damme was finally able to bring his talents and persona together and hit on a formula that worked. A string of action hits followed, including 1989’sKickboxer, in which he took more control of his image by helping to pen the film’s script. Van Damme really lets loose and pokes fun at himself in this one, at one point performing a hilarious dance sequence where he pauses occasionally to kick some bad guy butt.
Speaking of “butt,” looking to expand his appeal beyond the standard action movie fans, Van Damme went with some full rear nudity for the first time in 1990’sLionheart(another film he co-wrote) and found a whole new legion of female — and gay male — devotees. His backside became a whole separate co-star, and scores of people began filling theaters just for a chance to see the Belgian buns. Never missing an opportunity to generate more publicity for himself, Van Damme even started telling stories on the talk show circuit about his ability to crack walnuts between those enviable cheeks.
In 1994, Van Damme had his biggest hit withTimecop, a kind ofTerminator-meets-Total Recallthriller with Van Damme as a police officer traveling through time to once again belt the bad guys into submission. Though fairly formulaic in plot, anyone who’s seen the movie will remember the iconic moment where Van Damme jumps up and does the splits across his kitchen counter after annihilating an evildoer. Once again, he knew the formula and worked the heck out of it.
By 1995, audiences had begun looking for more than karate kicks in their movies and turned to more sophisticated action fare likeBatman ForeverandGoldeneye. While Van Damme continued to make action films, he had clearly reached his zenith. So what’s an aging action hero to do? Play himself, of course! In a 1996 episode of the TV seriesFriends, Van Damme sent up his own image, playing the object of affection of both Monica (Courtney Cox) and Rachel (Jennifer Aniston). When Rachel meets Van Damme for the first time and tells him Monica thinks he’s cute, his response is, “Youdon’t think I’m cute?” Once again, Van Damme was unafraid to wink and nudge at his big screen image, and it worked. He did it again in 2004 in an episode of TV’sLas Vegas, and in this one, he comically kills himself off when he performs a film stunt that goes wrong.
In his 50s and long past his kickboxing prime, Van Damme brilliantly reinvented himself as a comedy actor in 2016’s Amazon Prime seriesJean-Claude Van Johnson. The show revolves around Van Damme as himself reigniting his acting career while also going undercover as secret agent Jean-Claude Van Johnson. He’s older, he’s worn out, he has achy joints, and he struggles to do the things that made him a box office star all those years ago. He falls to the floor when he attempts a midair kick, he can barely lift a stack of weights, and, well, don’t even think about him doing those splits. Van Damme is hilarious in a role that not only mocks his action hero image, but that also pays homage it. It’s his opportunity to finally and overtly send up all the cheesiness and absurdity that made him a star in the first place.
From the first time he delivered a kick to the bad guy’s face on film, Van Damme has always been laughing a little on the inside. Now, at age 61, he’s able to laugh on the outside, too. Here’s hoping he’ll continue to entertain audiences with his own brand of self-deprecating and unpretentious humor in the years to come. Who wouldn’t love to see Van Damme inTimecop II: Electric Boogaloo?
