JCVD (2008) on Netflix
Jean-Claude Van Damme is broke, losing a custody fight over his daughter, and the offers have dried up. In Brussels he walks into a post office mid-robbery and is taken hostage.
- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb7.0/1041,562 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes84%
Trailer
Plot summary
Jean-Claude Van Damme is out of money, a judge is leaning toward granting his ex-wife custody, and his daughter will not accept him as a father. He goes home to Schaerbeek, in Brussels, where people still treat him as a hero. After posing for photographs with the clerks at a video store, he crosses the street to a post office to pick up a wire transfer. Inside, thieves are robbing the place and take him hostage with the other customers. When he helps them move a cabinet across the window, the police outside take him for the man running the robbery.
Cast
- Rock Chenas Réalisateur asiatique
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about JCVD (2008)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film began with a producer who had a deal with Jean-Claude Van Damme to play himself; the producer asked Mabrouk el Mechri, a Van Damme fan, to look at the original screenplay. Its writers had written Van Damme as merely a clown, but el Mechri thought there was more to him than his action-hero persona.
- For JCVD, Gaumont's title sequence was altered: instead of a silhouetted boy pulling a daisy that floats to space and becomes the company logo, a silhouetted Van Damme tries to take the daisy and roundhouse-kicks the boy, sending the daisy up to become the logo.
- Van Damme's six-minute, one-take monologue in JCVD refers to past drug problems; in real life he had trouble with cocaine in 1995 and entered a month-long rehab program in 1996, leaving after just one week.
- El Mechri estimated that about 70% of JCVD was scripted and the other 30% was improvised by the actors, with most of the ad-libs coming from Van Damme himself.
- JCVD was the first Jean-Claude Van Damme movie to receive a wide theatrical release since Universal Soldier: The Return, which came out in 1999.
