Three laughs: Double Team

 
It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of the quality of the filmmaking. In fact, it might be even harder to create unique trash that keeps surprising you than most "quality" films with which you know what you are going to get. It certainly is an even better pleasure to watch them. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you just can't believe what the film is showing to you, scene after scene. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.  

★ or ★★★★★

Three laughs case file #44:
Double Team (USA/Hong Kong, 1997)
Director: Tsui Hark

It's been known to come out of my mouth to say that Jean-Claude Van Damme has a surprisingly good filmography. Well, y'know, not good-good, but there's plenty of really over-the-top and silly actioners that are a lot more fun to watch than many of his peers. He also managed to star in both John Woo and Tsui Hark's Hollywood movies.

The hongkong cinema legends became rivals over dispute of the A Better Tomorrow series, directed by Woo and produced by Hark. Initially Hark made the third part without Woo, who became an international superstar in hos own right. It's quite clear which one of them was more talented, but Hark never gave up trying to upstage Woo's style. Case in point was 1997 when they both ran in the competition of who would make the more ridiculous Hollywood action movie. Woo made Face/Off, Hark made this.

The reason this film is called Double Team is first to cash in on Van Damme's previous Double Impact, but it also serves to remind that it's basically two very tangentially related movies in one. One, a gritty circle of revenge between a terrorist played by Mickey Rourke and Van Damme's counter-terrorist agent. The second, a weird ripoff of The Prisoner, where Van Damme is taken to a secluded scifi island retreat for ex-agents and plans for his escape.

And where does Dennis Rodman's arms dealer fit into all this? Basically nowhere, it seems they had a hunch Rodman would be a bigger star than he was, so his short role had to be expanded to be another of a buddy cop duo, with outrageous fashion items, bright hair colors and basketballl-related one-liners. The plot is a mess, the film tries very 90's-like to be cool with off-putting camera angles, endless explosions and cool-for-cools sake sets, locations, effects and visual elements that serve little purpose and eventually don't go nowhere. It all makes for a very entertaining, trashy movie that gets dumber and dumber as it goes along. 

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. When Van Damme finds himself on Conter-terrorist Island, he is immideately in a hurry to get out. His lover thinks he's dead and Rourke is out to get vengeance on him, since he accidentally killed his child (it's a weird position for a film's hero to basically be a child-killer). Thus, he begins a hilarious training routine in his motel room that gives fans of Muscles from Brussels what they bought their ticket for. He does the Splits climbing a door frame, punches a bucket full of gravel and lifts a bath tub all the while making pained expressions. He's also doing some MacGyver-like experiments with a Coke can that somehow will help him escape the daily routine later on.

2. Since Rodman can't act his way out of a paper bag, and Van Damme famously has a limited grasp in English, all the buddy scenes between the two play out quite differently than the film's producers probably had in mind. My favorite scene is when the pair of them have to jump out of an airplane in the middle of nowhere (Rourke's base is in the Colosseum in the middle of Rome). They bicker since there was no parachutes, but luckily, Rodman did became prepared. He somehow turns on a giant basketball over the pair of them that somehow shelters them from the impact. Real xXxTREME SPORTS!

3. The overly conveluted Finale is miraclous in itself, since it involves Rourke having dug landmines in the middle of the Colosseum and let out an angry tiger loose. Van Damme and Rodman are platforming around to find a missing baby. It's almost avant-garde how incoherent this all is, but one can't look away. The final coup the grace is when all the explosives are triggered and the pair saves themselves by shetering behind a number of Coke machines THAT CAME OUT OF FUCKING NOWHERE! One gets a sneaking suspicion that this film might have been sponsored by The Coca-Cola Company.