Jean-Claude Van Johnson

JCVD WTF LOL

Jean-Claude Van Damme, erstwhile action star, is retired. Really retired, 'not Nicholas Cage retired'. Despite this, a chance run in with an old flame lures him out from a life of segways and coconut water showers, and back to what he does best: Making shitty movies as cover for his work as an international freelance black-ops badass, codenamed Johnson.

Yes. Really.

The central conceit of this Amazon pilot is that all those cheap action movies shot in Eastern Europe are cover for their 'stars' to operate as deniable secret agents. Johnson's back up is provided by his ex, on-set hairdresser and sniper Vanessa, and the make-up guy Luis, a former child soldier with a literally unspeakable past (when asked about it he gets flashes of horrifying images and screaming, then dismisses it as 'not that interesting' in what is surely intended to be a running gag if the series is picked up,) and his mission to plant a tracker in a shipment of HK - heroin cut with ketamine, apparently - although the latter is less important than that he gets to go in disguise through a factory thanks to a coincidental resemblance to one of the actual workers, Filip (played by 'Filip Van Damme', IMDb tells me), fail to convince Filip that he is himself from the future thanks to the logic of Timecop trumping that of Looper because it is a million times better, get beaned in the head when he fails his own trademark splits, then fight an army of security guys.

JCVD is made up for an action reimagining of Huckleberry Finn which has to
be seen to be believed.

Jean-Claude Van Johnson is a staggeringly audacious project and the latest installment in JCVD's highly public process of self-deconstruction. In places it is reminiscent of 2008's remorselessly downbeat JCVD, but with way more action and humour. The jokes actually come thick and fast, from the films JCVD is offered - action reimaginings of 'Rikki Tiki Tavi', 'Anne of Green Gables' and 'Huckleberry Finn' - to the skewering of celebrity life and hipster fashion - he visits a pop-up restaurant called Dri Ramen, which serves only dry ramen noodles - and commentary on the changing style of action movies. In the final fight the guards start to rush JCVD en masse and their leader holds them back, ordering: "No, no! One at a time. We'll run into each other. It'll get confusing."

Again, I want to see this get picked up, if only because 'Johnson' replaces another agent called Brown, noted for his extreme methods. We later learn that Brown has threatened vengeance, and I kind of want to know which aging action star Brown would turn out to be.