Double Team (1997)

OK: JCVD and Dennis Rodman are in an action movie that involves terrorism, guns, high kicks, European travel, and Mickey Rourke, so there was no way I wouldn't want to see Double Team. The utterly nonsensical and convoluted plot sort of goes like this: Jack Quinn (Van Damme) is a retired anti-terrorist superspy living in France with his pregnant wife. When mercenary assassin Stavros (Mickey Rourke) steals plutonium to... do something bad? maybe?... Quinn is re-enlisted. He misses his target, Stavros's son ends up dead, and our hero ends up in a near-exact replica of The Prisoner. Then he busts out and finds out his girlfriend is kidnapped (apparently?), and he teams up with weapons dealer Yaz (Dennis Rodman) and they travel around Europe with suspicious ease to take down Stavros (who's pissed about his son) once and for all. That's sort of what it's about. In a way.

Oh jeez, this is one of the most awesomely ridiculous movies. At first I was taken aback and confused by how little the story made any kind of sense, but as it progressed and it got crazier and crazier I was able to just sit back and enjoy. The fights are pretty spectacular, the dialogue is beyond cheesy, and Denis Rodman's wardrobe and hairstyle changes are fascinating and frequent. There's a tiger fight, skydiving, landmines, a toeknife, an underwater battle, and an exploding Colosseum. Van Damme does some high kicks, Rourke boxes, and Rodman relates all of his actions to basketball in irrelevant metaphors.

While Double Team certainly comes off as raucous, campy fun, it was definitely trying to be a mostly serious action thriller, so its unintentional hilarious effects are almost sad. The completely weird and unnecessary Prisoner tangent, the child-killing, and the pregnant-wife kidnapping all point to an attempt at a more intelligent type of film, but it's written so stupidly that nothing works. It's funny as hell, sure, but I felt really lost both narratively and thematically during the earlier parts of the film before I had a handle on the craziness. Generally, it's a very strange and very entertaining action movie with kickass actors, intense action scenes, and a laughably inexplicable plot. Good times.

As a movie: 2/5
As entertainment: 4/5