By Sara Bright
Another list of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s best films is doing the rounds. It’s his birthday, or an anniversary of something, and the internet remembers.
And you look at the titles. Bloodsport. Kickboxer. Universal Soldier. And you think, what are we actually celebrating here? Is it the splits? The helicopter kicks? The sheer, almost absurd physical perfection of a man who seemed less like an actor and more like a special effect carved from marble?
Yes, of course it’s that. But that’s not the whole story, is it?
At first, you just think of the muscles. The “Muscles from Brussels”. That was the brand. In the late 80s and early 90s, the video shop shelves were a battlefield dominated by titans. Schwarzenegger was the cyborg future. Stallone was the blue-collar American heart. And Van Damme? He was something else. Something more… European. More elegant. Almost beautiful. He didn’t just punch people; he moved with a balletic grace that the other guys just didn’t have.
He was selling a kind of physical fantasy. The story of him getting his big break by doing the splits for a producer in a restaurant is legendary. Why? Because it’s perfect. It’s his entire career in one anecdote. I have this one incredible thing I can do. Put me in a film. And they did. For a decade, that was the deal. He’d turn up, look magnificent, perform a few acts of impossible physical poetry, and the film would make a fortune.
The films themselves were… well, they were what they were. Revenge plots so simple you could write them on the back of a napkin. Training montages. A final, bloody tournament. It was a formula. And it worked.
But then, somewhere along the line, something interesting started to happen. You see hints of it even in the early days. Look at Double Impact, where he plays twins. It’s a ridiculous gimmick, of course. One is a slick LA fitness instructor, the other is a gruff Hong Kong smuggler. But it’s the first sign that he wants to be more than just a body. He wants to act. He’s trying to show range, even if the script is giving him nothing to work with.
Then you get Universal Soldier. On the surface, it’s just him versus Dolph Lundgren. But his character isn’t a hero. He’s a reanimated corpse. A machine. And the whole story is about this machine slowly, painfully starting to remember that it was once a man. There’s a sadness there, a confusion. It’s the first time you see a proper crack in the marble facade.
A career like Van Damme’s isn’t like a pristine sculpture in a museum. It’s more like a beloved old leather jacket. It’s been through the wars. It’s got scuffs and tears. It probably smells a bit of cheap aftershave and regret. But it’s got a story. It’s been lived in. And the interesting bits are in the imperfections.
Actually, scrap that. The most important film on any of these lists, the one that tells you everything you need to know, isn’t Bloodsport or Kickboxer. It’s a strange little Belgian film from 2008 called JCVD.
And what is JCVD? It’s Jean-Claude Van Damme, playing Jean-Claude Van Damme. A washed-up action star who’s broke, losing a custody battle for his daughter, and can’t even get a decent role anymore. He walks into a post office in his hometown, gets caught up in a real-life robbery, and the whole thing becomes a media circus.
There is a scene in that film, a single, unbroken six-minute take, where he rises out of the action and speaks directly to the camera. He just… talks. He talks about his life, his career, the drug problems, the burnout, the regret. He cries. It’s not acting. It’s a confession. It’s the sound of a man completely dismantling the myth he’s spent his entire life building. The muscles, the kicks, the stardom… it was all just a costume. And underneath it was just this tired, lonely, confused guy from Brussels who wanted to be something. It is one of the bravest, most astonishing things I have ever seen an actor do on screen.
After that, you can’t look at the old films in the same way. You start to see the sadness that was always there, behind the eyes. You see the vulnerability. Schwarzenegger was a machine. Stallone was a monument. Van Damme was always… breakable.
He knew it, too. Look at his glorious turn as the villain in The Expendables 2. He’s having the time of his life, chewing the scenery, because he’s finally in on the joke. He understands his own legend, and he understands how absurd it is. The TV series Jean-Claude Van Johnson, where he plays himself as a secret agent using his terrible movies as a cover… it’s the same thing. A long, elaborate act of self-parody.
So when we talk about his best roles, what are we really talking about? Are we talking about the perfect physical specimen from Bloodsport? Or are we talking about the man who was brave enough to show the world how broken he was in JCVD?
The thing is, you can’t have one without the other. The tragic, self-aware performance of his later career only has power because of the absurd, god-like perfection of his youth. He had to build the monument before he could show us the cracks. And the cracks are where the real art is. The lists will always celebrate the splits. But the real story is much more complicated, and much more human, than that.
