I Regret to Inform You that the Movie Where Jean-Claude Van Damme Plays Identical Twins Isn't Anywhere Near as Much Fun as It Should Be — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

If I continue doing this column and this website for decades to come there is a very good chance that I will get around to re-watching every movie I saw as a teenager and vaguely nursed plans to re-experience at some point in the future.

The filmography of Jean-Claude Van Damme is full of movies like this, nutty, novelty-rich oddities that I half-remember digging as a movie-crazed teenager and then neophyte movie critic.

I’m talking previous Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entries Hard Target, The Quest, Knock Off, Double Team and now 1991’s Double Impact.

I don’t remember much about Double Impact beyond gratuitous nudity, bad acting and an Amazonian lesbian henchman in skin tight latex whose crassly exploitative presence here fulfills at least a handful of very 1991 fetishes.

The EVIL lesbian gropes one of our hero’s girlfriends in a manner that is supposed to be both SINFUL and EROTIC because it involves two hot women and consequently sensually wicked and wicked in its its sinful carnality.

I’ve always kind of wanted to re-visit Double Impact because a movie where Jean-Claude Van Damme plays BOTH a glowering, cigar-smoking, whiskey-swigging Clint Eastwood-style ultra-masculine badass AND a totally laid-back California hunk has to be at least a little bit awesome, doesn’t it? How can that NOT be a recipe for camp bliss? How could you possibly go wrong with a conceit like that?

Then I re-watched Double Impact and discovered just how depressingly possible it was to ruin a can’t miss idea like Jean-Claude Van Damme playing two very different identical twins who reunite after twenty-five years apart to take down the people who murdered their parents.

For starters, Double Impact is 110 minutes long. 110 minutes! That is officially at least twenty minutes longer than a movie where Jean-Claude Van Damme plays identical twins has any right to be.

But it needs all that time for all that generic action. Going into Double Impact I assumed that being a movie where Jean-Claude Van Damme plays identical twins, it would have a sense of humor about itself, a light touch and an understanding of its own fundamental ridiculousness.

I was wrong. Double Impact introduces a movie with an inherently comic premise, with two eminently laughable performances by Van Damme, then inexplicably plays it more or less totally straight.

This material angrily cries out for zaniness, for tomfoolery. Instead we get a supremely misguided production that’s in a hurry to rush through all the fun stuff involving identical twins growing up on opposite sides of the world ignorant of each other’s existences so it can get to the standard-issue fights and shootouts.

Van Damme deserves much of the blame. In addition to playing a dual role he co-wrote the story and the screenplay, produced AND choreographed the fights. He did a sub-par all around, although his acting is at least flamboyantly bad enough to be entertaining.

Double Impact opens with a prologue set 25 years before the main action where our heroes’ parents are gunned down by Chinese mobsters despite the best effort of bodyguard Frank Avery (Geoffrey Lewis).

Lewis spends the entire film looking like he’s annoyed by the stupidity of everything around him and he’s filled with shame over his decision to be in it and he starred in MULTIPLE films alongside Clint Eastwood and a horrifically abused orangutan.

My heart goes out to that poor, simple creature. So if you’re sipping on something, pour a little out for that unfortunate ape. If you’re smoking, light up a J for the simian homies that passed too soon after stealing a donut from craft services.

Frank raises twin Chad himself in California and trains him to help run his dojo. The adult Chad is introduced in tights so revealing that they turned me gay. He’s holding court and being drooled over by a bevy of leotard-clad beauties who could clearly gaze at his physical perfection and peerless beauty until their dying breaths.

The Belgian stunner shows off his legendary gift for doing the splits, then begins thrusting back and forth in an unmistakably erotic fashion. If the movie had maintained this tone throughout it would be a delight.

Instead it quickly abandons it for one more serious and less fun. Chad travels with Frank to Hong Kong, where he learns that he has an identical twin brother named Alex (Van Damme) who is exactly like him physically, down to his astonishing martial arts prowess, but is nothing like him personality wise.

Some movies make you believe that an actor playing identical twins are really two different people. Adaptation is such a movie despite Nicolas Cage dressing alike as both Donald and Charlie Kaufman. Not Double Impact. At no point does it ever feel like we’re watching anything other than Van Damme confront his limitations as an actor and entertainer against his distractingly unconvincing doppelgänger.

We can’t suspend disbelief for a fraction of a millisecond both because the film is terribly directed and edited and because Van Damme delivers two singularly misguided performances that individually and collectively had me scratching my head and performatively saying, “HUH?” out loud.

In a less confused film, playing hyper-macho tough guy Alex would give Van Damme a chance to goof on more dour peers like Clint Eastwood, gloomy exemplars of old school masculinity who didn’t go in for gymnastics and hypnotic Belgian accents.

Instead Van Damme eschews parody or satire for straightforward action and gloomy psychodrama. Alex would be a loathsome asshole even if he didn’t hit his girlfriend in jealousy and rage and call his identical twin brother multiple homophobic slurs.

In Alex’s big scene he imagines his hated identical twin brother making passionate love to his girlfriend, drinking himself into a frenzy at the supposed indiscretion. He’s filled with murderous rage and jealousy but you can also tell he wants to whip it out and start jacking it to his intense incestuous cuck fantasies.

The role of Chad, Karate Ken and affable idiot with a very unlikely backstory, is less joyless and constricting but Double Impact makes the fatal flaw of not allowing its star to have fun and be fun. It feels like Van Damme is apologizing for being fun and sexy and goofy and European, and not a grim action hero when it’s precisely the goofy, sexy side of Van Damme that makes him special and should be embraced rather than shunned.

Double Impact takes itself way more seriously than a movie like it should. It feels like it was written and directed by Alex rather than Chad, to reflect his no-bullshit, all-action approach to life, and that guy is no fun at all, even when he’s being played by someone as effortlessly charismatic as Van Damme.

Pre-order The Fractured Mirror, the Happy Place’s next book, a 600 page magnum opus about American films about American films, illustrated by the great Felipe Sobreiro over at https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out! And it’s only 16.50, shipping, handling and taxes included, 30 bucks for two books, domestic only!

Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop

Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace We just added a bunch of new tiers and merchandise AND a second daily blog just for patrons!

Alternately you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al, signed, for just 19.50, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here.

I make my living exclusively through book sales and Patreon so please support independent media and one man’s dream and kick in a shekel or two!