Not as good as I was hoping, but still pretty good - the best film Van Damme has made in years, possibly ever. He plays himself and we follow him through a court battle for custody of his daughter before he gets caught up in a bank robbery. The rest of the movie shows how he deals with being an ordinary person with a real gun in his face, rather than a Hollywood good guy faced with a fake gun. It's unique in that it mixes fact with fiction in a peculiar way. Real details of Van Damme's life are mixed in with the bank robbery. It makes for an odd film but it's also oddly compelling.
Van Damme is really rather good in it, it's certainly the best acting I've ever seen from him - probably helped by the fact that for the majority of it, he's speaking French rather than English. His long monologue in the middle of the movie is particularly well done - it almost feels like Van Damme speaking for himself rather than acting. Hopefully this will prove to be the injection his flagging career needs and maybe a move away from the low-budget action B-movies he's been stuck in for a while. I'd certainly like to see him doing some more serious acting.
The subtitles are terrible though - they're full of spelling mistakes and even missing words. Surely it wouldn't have been that difficult to get someone fluent in English to read through them? It makes me wonder exactly how accurate a translation they were.
My rating: 7.8 / 10
IMDB rating: 7.6 / 10
Running time: 96 mins
IMDB link
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