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.

The Tick

If the sight of a big, blue butt is a deal-breaker, switch off now.

It's Amazon pilot season, which means it's time to get random.

The Tick began life as a logo, became a comic book character, obtained perhaps his greatest success in an inimitable animated series. His live action incarnation was... less successful. More costumed sitcom than action adventure, thanks to budgetary concerns, it was a witty romp with a strong awareness of the world of superheroes it was parodying. The Tick's complete and repeated inability to penetrate a jerky Superman expy's 'glasses and hairdo' disguise even when he sees him take the glasses off was priceless, and the line 'you killed the Immortal' surely deserves some place in media history.

But that was then and this is now, and with the genre riding high it's apparently time for another live action reinvention. This time it's Peter Serafinowicz donning the blues, with Griffin Newman as his sidekick Arthur. The pilot hits a lot of familiar beats, including the Tick trashing Arthur's apartment looking for his hidden HQ, but there's a darker edge here. Arthur first appears in civilian clothes - something that never happened in either the animated or previous live action shows - and only acquires a very techno-looking incarnation of his moth suit in the closing seconds. His history is also tragically expanded, having been obsessed with tracking the supposedly deceased supervillain the Terror since his father became collateral damage in the defeat of the City's former superteam, the Flag Five. There is even a hint that the nigh invulnerable Tick, with the reflexes of an Olympic level jungle cat and the strength of a bus stop full of men, is a manifestation of Arthur's subconscious, although his pummeling of villains is real enough.

There's actually something almost sinister about the Tick's grin in the face of
Arthur's more gritty origin storyline.

For all its familiarity, The Tick is a new beast, and where its live-action forerunner eschewed one-off mayhem for sitcom, this version is front-loaded with arc plots and even mythology, opening with the arrival of the world's first superhero, possibly from space. Jackie Earle Hayley, fresh from being a creepy bastard on Preacher brings a potentially recurring creepy bastard presence to The Tick as the supposedly deceased Terror. It is also a very beautifully made series, with some truly sumptuous cityscapes serving to make the City itself more of a presence.

There is some significant tonal dissonance between the Tick's trademark superheroic nonsense - "You're standing there, in your way, but you're a better door than you are a window, so open yourself up, step through yourself and join me over here." - and Arthur's tragic history and mental illness (in the animated series his sister Dot worried that he wasn't dating; here she's worried that he's skipping his meds and might be involuntarily confined by the police.) That this is deliberate is clear from the juxtaposition of a radio discussion of the Flag Five being 'blinded with weaponised syphilis and then shot to death', and a later flashback to the brutal reality of the scene as it plays out in front of the young Arthur. The question, I guess, is whether that dissonance would be the series' hallmark or its undoing. In a more crowded superhero market, the creators are clearly going for something in a darker line of satire. It's a risky bid with the Tick, but could work. I do find myself hoping that we get a chance to find out.