Double Team (1997)

 

Director: Tsui Hark

Screenplay: Don Jakoby and Paul Mones

Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme as Jack Paul Quinn, Dennis Rodman as Yaz, Mickey Rourke as Stavros, Natacha Lindinger as Kathryn "Kath" Quinn

Ephemeral Waves

 

With this, I can shoot the dick off a hummingbird.

Double Team is one of those "guilty pleasure" films from the past, a phrase which does not work for me because I feel no guilt for this enjoyment of Double Team, but is sadly the only one I know of in the English language to best describe a film which is not successful in terms of portraying a fully immersive world to engage with, whether for the action genre or not, but wins me over for the fact the film even inexplicably exists. There was a time this was deemed a bankable prospect, teaming Belgium action actor Jean-Claude Van Damme with then basketball bad boy Dennis Rodman in a film that takes its entire premise serious without irony, as nineties as you can get.

Double Team is late in Van Damme's blockbuster era, nearing the end, which stands out for how this is a big budget film in context with its production value, even with shots at a real architectural location, a real place of historical value, to represent the Roman Colosseum, alongside stunt work and some budget for something whose scene by scene synopsis is ridiculous. Van Damme is Jack Paul Quinn, a retired "hunter" for spies, with wife and an expected child, brought back in the game by the promise to finally catch the terrorist Stavros, played by Mickey Rourke in his wilderness years. Rodman, whilst it is only halfway through when he fully joins into the plot, is Yaz the arms dealer and inventor, living up to Rodman's reputation for unconventional dress sense on court and off it whilst living in Antwerp, Belgium in the district where everyone wears rubber, divers in fish tanks replace erotic dancers, and drum n bass music scores the streets if you stop to listen. The actual film beyond this is as mad as a box of frogs, but you can also see the talent of director Tsui Hark, who is the third noticeable figure here. This was when he briefly went to American, as a lot of Hong Kong filmmakers and actors did, due to the 1997 Hong Kong transfer to China, bringing his stylistic touches even when paying tribute to John Woo's Hard Boiled (1992) in a hospital shootout with babies when Stravos loses his own son and wife during a botched attempt to catch him alive at a carnival.

The tone takes everything seriously, but from Don Jakoby and Paul Mones' script, it gets increasingly more absurd as events escalate for Quinn, and the best comparison is actually a certain type of Japanese manga, and the anime adaptations you were more likely to get in the West at the time Double Team was released, which takes its story entirely seriously but has plot escalation serves which when scrutinised individually, or shown in a live action film as here, are ridiculous. In terms of structure, this is as basic a film as you can get, where the lead is merely a name for Van Damme, and that the stakes is the generic ideal of the beautiful wife, a cipher for a fully fleshed out person rather than the person, played Natacha Lindinger. Next to a film like The Blade (1995), one of Tsui Hark's last films before he left for this brief two part Van Damme period in the United States, which is a fully fleshed out remake of The One-Armed Swordsman (1967) that emphasises telling the story in its visual style, Double Team is paltry in comparison. Instead what we get here is a heightened fever dream, as over-the-top as you can get where my pleasure comes from what it was stringing together in its content, something which starts fully when Quinn is made officially "dead" after the botched Stravos mission, ending up in what feels like a tribute to The Prisoner (1967).

Evoking the legendary British TV series about actor Patrick McGoohan being stuck in a secret colony, here Van Damme ends up in a colony for covert operatives deemed too important to let back into society, Quinn stuck imprisoned on an island with other spies and agents who were too valuable to kill. It is a premise for a high concept film by itself, as they have to act as inspectors on high tech computers, analysing terror incidents around the world with timed watches to punish those who try to escape, but like those manga, this will casually have an elaborate set piece to ditch it, including a real stunt of someone hanging off a cargo plane. This has a surreal randomness like some of the best of the action genre, excepting their artificiality, and that eventually we will get more inexplicably details like the cyber team of Italian Catholic monks, in a gothic location with the skulls of their ancestors on display underground, who are a surveillance ring of Rome with advanced computer knowledge. For a film that is surprisingly marked for eighteen year olds only to see in Britain, despite being tame for the age rating, this is the broad stereotypical cartoon of the era, which gets more delirious as it goes along despite the structure and pace being conventional next to its peers.

Van Damme found himself in this world of films, as Hark's Knock Off (1998), where things always had an absurdity, some intentionally humoured and some not, with the likes of the 1994 adaption of the Street Fighter video game franchise, which became G.I.  Joe with one liners. Van Damme is being steered along in a film like this, even when he ends up wearing a wig and shades at a point, at a no-nonsense hero in a time which was incredibly chaotic for him and would eventually drift away from the mainstream. Rodman does feel stiff in performance including all the jarring basketball references in his conversations, which is a shame as I can see the charisma is struggling to get onscreen. He is not helped by the moments where he is the butt of jokes, including having a really tall man in a very tiny Italian car, details which can be raised as problematic as you have made the star of the show, specially an African American sports star, into a comedic side character despite the fact he would have been a huge selling point, his notoriety even leading to himself in World Championship Wrestling in 1997 at the same time. When this is not the case, you can see where the charisma is, even if he would have never been a huge film star unless he drastically became more comfortable with line readings. When he is allowed to be a living manga character, his stuff gets to be interesting in terms of a celebrity becoming a cinematic one. Insanely tall, towering over everyone else with his suits and face piercings, and with disregard for logic for the better as Yaz not only has constant costume changes per scene but different hair dye jobs too, Rodman was the selling point to the film even if times the movie wants to make him entirely a side kick, even appearing in vocal cameo for the end credit song, Just a Freak by Crystal Waters to emphasis this fact.

The story itself for Double Team is conventional, merely a pretext for the scenarios, which is the ultimate critique for a film like this were it not for the sense I really do not care. Hark's flair is visually here when it can be, such as precise use of slow motion in the baroquely staged carnival shoot out. Even something which is banal and cannot be defended, the prominent Coca Cola placement, is used with such a ridiculous extent it eventually is subverted by accident, one cola vending machine explicitly in the Roman Colosseum used as a defensive shield strong enough to withstand a bomb that decimates a major landmark. There is enough of a severity, with complete late of irony, to help the film along with an earnest nature, where even its goofy humour are less mocking itself but a wackiness from films from the nineties including Van Damme's own. If this had shown any irony whatsoever, rather than be so back accident in have comedic moments, I might have despised this, where if there is an illusion of caring for these archetypes in an absurd film, the film makers not even giving the decency to care for their fate, as sadly happens in others, would have made this unbearable. The sense of serious is found in allowing characters to goof off but not mock the film as flimsy, whilst Mickey Rourke, , in a period before Sin City (2005) brought him back into mainstream attention, helps with this whether he was acting his emotionally scarred terrorist Starvos with sincerity or pure professionalism.

This is film, in mind to this, that would need all the commitment you could get, and it pays off for myself in terms of how it has the most over-the-top ending you could find, ridiculous but what I have hoped others from the likes of Steven Seagal but never got. The finale takes place at the Colosseum, with a newly born baby in peril, landmines planted in the ground, Rodzilla entering on a dirt bike, and a real tiger with animal trainers involved in the production, because landmines and one-on-one combat were not enough to kill Quinn in what is. For a higher budget production, it is in context, a mad experience to witness, more so as this is not a low budget made with CGI production of decades later, where irony sadly becomes a more occuring trend in multiple genres, but with the aforementioned real tiger, a real motorbike stunt and real pyrotechnics alongside nineties era computer effects. And that is why, whilst I realise how cheesy the production is, I love the film in spite of itself because of this sincere batshit logic matched with the production values and cast. Even when they struggle, to make something more than a half arsed production with a sense of deliberately sabotaging itself in irony is appreciated. There is a pleasure, even if irrational, for managing to sincerely play with the strange set of selling points this did even if I admit this is a strange non-sequitur for those involved including Tsui Hark, who continued this with the equally weird Knock Off, before going back to Hong Kong cinema with a sense none of this happened.