Call it Jean-Claude Van Damme's Being John Malkovich moment.
In the opening sequence in his namesake drama JCVD, the C-list martial-arts movie star is punching, kicking and blasting his way across a wartime wasteland.
Even if he's looking pouchy and road-weary these days, it's the kind of thing audiences expect to see from the star of such so-cheesy-it's-genius action fare as director John Woo's Hard Target (1993) and Double Team (1997), opposite basketball bad-boy Dennis Rodman.
But the scene falls apart when a prop wall tumbles down behind the Belgian-born action hero.
Cut!
Turns out, we've been watching Van Damme make another schlock action flick, the latest in a string of straight-to-DVD duds that have been Van Damme's stock-in-trade for the past decade.
"It's very difficult for me to do everything in one shot! I'm 47 years old," Van Damme complains to an Asian action auteur who scoffs, "He still thinks we're making Citizen Kane?"
JCVD is Van Damme's first art-house offering.
A jokey-yet-sincere confessional, the movie is a standout in the actor's two-decade filmography, which is distinguished by some of the most jaw-dropping, unselfconscious wooden acting committed to film.
Nonetheless, his physique, balletic finesse with roundhouse kicks and goofy charisma allowed Van Damme to occupy a special tier of stardom just beneath action stars Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
JCVD, shot in French, arrives at a cultural moment when being a yesteryear action hero willing to deconstruct past glories is a plus (Mickey Rourke's up to the same trick in The Wrestler).
It also provides a meditation on the downside to stardom, using Van Damme's plight - his real-life history of substance abuse and DIC arrests, precarious financial situation and waning fame - as a case study.
The former European middleweight karate champion, better known as the "Muscles From Brussels," takes on a role unlike any in his last 38 movies: himself. That is, a middle-aged Hollywood has-been looking for a new lease on life.
"I decided to talk about myself and open myself. Peeling off the skin of a peach," Van Damme said from Bangkok.
He added: "In JCVD, I am naked."
This gutsy, oddly entertaining movie can be traced to a 2003 French TV documentary called Dans le Peau de Jean-Claude Van Damme (Under the Skin of Jean-Claude Van Damme) directed by Frederic Benudis, which features the action star speaking candidly about his career mistakes and on-screen image.
With screenwriter Christophe Turpin, Benudis also co-wrote a meta-movie script called The King of Belgium. The action-comedy's plot has Van Damme embroiled in a bank robbery and hostage situation reminiscent of 1975's Dog Day Afternoon but deriving a certain antic energy from the idea that Van Damme would be powerless in the face of a real-life crisis.
The screenplay was optioned and made its way to indie director Mabrouk El Mechri after the success of his debut feature, Virgil. When King of Belgium producer Marc Fiszman offered to introduce El Mechri to Van Damme, the director jumped at the chance - more excited to meet one of his childhood heroes than to discuss bringing the movie to the screen.
El Mechri seized the opportunity, however, to deliver the karate chopper some tough love.
"I said to him, `You're a great action star'," the director recalled. "But I told him he was just doing the same film over and over. Everybody got bored. Add to that the problems with substance [abuse], the weird stuff he's known for saying in the media. He became this weird pop-culture icon. I was allowed to say that. I didn't care if he liked it or not."
Turns out, that dose of reality was exactly what Van Damme needed after years in career purgatory. "I fell in love with that guy," Van Damme said. "He told me, 'Don't be scared. I want to do something that shows another side of you'."
El Mechri did a top-down rewrite of The King of Belgium. And although the end result, JCVD, is hardly worshipful to its subject, it uses his foibles as a five-time-married, coke-sniffing, down-on-his-luck matinee idol to humanise Van Damme.
"Even though he didn't have a film in the theatre for years, you walk with him on any street anywhere in the world and he's still a star," El Mechri said.
"But when you're that huge, you don't necessarily have access to honesty."
About two-thirds of the way through JCVD, Van Damme steps back from the action to breach moviedom's "fourth wall" and speak directly to the viewer.
Looking exhausted and puffy, he takes stock of his life over the course of a 6-minute monologue: the matrimonial failures, tax debts and estranged children.
He speaks candidly about how he turned to drugs when having it all no longer seemed like enough. As well, Van Damme grapples with the way the movie biz built him up and cast him asunder.
"It's not my fault if I was cut out to be a star," he explains.
"I asked for it, really believed in it. When you're 13, you believe in your dream. Well, it came true for me. But I still ask myself, what have I done on this Earth?"
Weeping, he answers his own question: "Nothing! I've done nothing!"
Of the scene, which has become the movie's primary talking point, El Mechri said: "It was a complete improvisation based on some notes he had on a pad. The weirdest thing is, I know him really well. And I can't say if he's acting or not in that scene."
