When it comes to offering mere genre thrills, the action and comedy to “Jean-Claude Van Johnson” becomes perhaps more grating than it should be as the series is never as clever as it thinks it is. If you’re not already sharing Van Damme's lament that he isn’t more relevant in 2017, “Jean-Claude Van Johnson” is not the best place to start. The joke of all of this being done by Van Damme lacks the desired charm, even with asides about his career (“I’m not like Nicolas Cage retired”) or references to how the “Muscles from Brussels” can’t do the splits like he used to. Aside from appreciating the Van Damme references, you have to see much more than just a worn down face when you look at Van Damme, who plays a mopey version of his star persona (riding his Segway alone, cleaning his own statue) but struggles to make the case that he’s a strong comedic performer or even a curious shell of a real-life superstar. ![]() It doesn’t particularly help that a viewer must bring a fair amount to the table in order to see what the series is winking at. But to put it in perspective of his career, there’s nothing in this series that is as brilliantly campy as “ Double Team,” or “ Sudden Impact,” etc, showing the limits of the series' sense of humor. The show is fine being plainly silly but it’s best being outrageous, such as a doomsday device to control the weather or a doppelgänger that Van Damme plays like Kyle MacLachlan did Dougie in “Twin Peaks: The Return.” There are callbacks to Van Damme’s other films in the stories, like “ Double Impact” or “Timecop” ("Timecop" is compared to Rian Johnson's " Looper" roughly a thousand times) as if Van Damme himself is living in a type of loop. The two identities become intertwined later on, like with a life-or-death Van Johnson fight happening on a Van Damme film set, but it proves to be a rare dynamic moment for an action-comedy that too often runs flat. In a bit of action-comedy contrivance that doesn’t full come together logically, Van Damme is Van Damme by day, but Van Johnson by night when sabotaging a drug factory or street racing, the latter happening in the second episode. The mission of season one of “Jean-Claude Van Johnson” takes the two to Bulgaria, where Van Damme has to shoot a goofy action adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huck Finn while stopping a deadly drug from going across Europe. Van Damme decides to take himself out of retirement in both senses to rekindle his relationship with an old flame named Vanessa (Kat Foster), who also works in black ops but as a hairdresser on set. It takes place in a world where Jean-Claude Van Damme did make “ Timecop” and other gems, became a superstar, and now struggles with being confused for Nicolas Cage. But the twist is that he’s also a black ops agent, assigned by his talent agent ( Phylicia Rashad) to various international missions, her agency like an MI6 in James Bond-speak. “Jean-Claude Van Johnson” has a premise with the potential for fruitful action, comedy, and self-reflexive material. ![]() But both of those enterprises ran out of genre gas in their respective lengths, something that proves to be the case with this essentially three-hour movie, each episode directed by Atencio. ![]() The series is a curious connection between two previous action storytellers: director Peter Atencio previously did “ Keanu,” which featured Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key as two action buffs caught up in a real world of bad guys and death, and the series is created by Dave Callaham, who perhaps most famously helped kick off “The Expendables” trilogy as a reflexive all-star game that got Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, Jason Statham and others in the same action sequences.
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