Welcome to How to Start Watching, in which our staff will recommend movies that will help you start watching a particular genre, director, film movement, etc. It’s a list of movies, but with a purpose that isn’t recounting the best or even favorites. Each entry will suggest a few films that will help you find a way into more movies! A starter pack, if you will.

by Nikk Nelson, Staff Writer, Cinematic Maniac

Step one, start referring to Jean-Claude Van Damme as JCVD—it’s easier on everyone. The second, final, and most important step is to have fun. With rare exception, JCVD movies are all the same. They are a bowl of cold, comforting ice cream.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to where to start watching JCVD I told myself out loud in the shower. The simplest is, well, at the beginning, with his first co-starring role in No Retreat, No Surrender (1986). Director Corey Yuen liked The Karate Kid (1984) but thought the fighting sequences could have been a lot better. The result is the kind of movie that ends up on the How Did This Get Made? podcast but the fight sequences, especially those featuring JCVD, are indeed impressive. After being chronically unavailable save for import bootleg DVD’s ripped from a VHS, a special edition blu-ray was finally released by Kino Lorber with both the international and US theatrical cut. I highly recommend the latter over the former because, among other reasons that are probably clear to anyone who has seen both versions, it features the awesome Joe Torono song, “Stand on Your Own”. I have the softest of soft spots for this movie. I watched it constantly as a kid. 

The second, more complex entry point for JCVD is Mabrouk El Mechri’s 2008 film JCVD. Perhaps you know of JCVD in that, for a long time he made big, loud, dumb, extremely successful action movies and then all of a sudden, he didn’t anymore. Around the mid-90’s, struggling with a moviegoing culture getting fatigued by his brand of action film, and what was estimated to be a ten thousand dollar a day cocaine addiction, the quality of JCVD’s movies, and the number of people who saw them, steeply declined. I’ll discuss that in more detail later. I call that his Van Dammit period.

But what JCVD, the film, does is humanize the man to a great degree. It essentially asks the question, what would JCVD do, in real life, if he was caught in the middle of a bank robbery/hostage situation? And the answer, of course, is nothing even close to what he would do if it was one of his movies. There are a few heartbreaking moments in this film you can tell were ripped directly out of the man himself. So, for people who have perhaps been dismissive of JCVD and/or his films in the past, this is a great way to activate some empathy, so you can start to enjoy his films with a new perspective.  

The Salad Days (1988-1995):

Starting with the breakout hit Bloodsport (1988), America fell in love with “The Muscles from Brussels”. JCVD was young, hot, talented and by the early 90’s, a solid A-lister releasing hit after hit alongside the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. The market seemed to have a bottomless demand for muscle-bound good guys shooting guns, blowing shit up, and kicking everyone’s ass in the face. My JCVD Greatest Hits List is as follows: Bloodsport (1988); Cyborg (1989); Kickboxer (1989); Lionheart (1990); Double Impact (1991); Universal Soldier (1992); Hard Target (1993).

There’s something to appreciate about every JCVD movie but these are my favorites, especially Double Impact where JCVD plays twin brothers, one of whom is more of an anti-hero and, laugh if you want, in that role, you get to see JCVD flex some acting muscle too. It co-stars Geoffrey Lewis, who elevates the movie tremendously, and Bolo Yeung returns once again as the heavy and it’s my favorite performance of his. In Universal Soldier, JCVD squares off against fellow action star of the era, Dolph Lundgren. This movie has some genuinely funny moments and a really good story to it, at least by these standards. My love for Hard Target is documented in my MovieJawn piece appreciating John Woo and I really can’t say enough about it. It is objectively JCVD’s best movie. 

Timecop (dir. Peter Hyams, 1994)

I put Timecop (1994) by itself for a couple of reasons. One, even though, in my opinion, Hard Target is JCVD’s best movie, this was, not just the peak JCVD film, but where the audience started to move away from movies like this in general. It seemed like everyone was having trouble. Arnold Schwarzenegger experienced his first box office bomb in 1993 with Last Action Hero—in which JCVD of course makes a cameo. Two years later, Sylvester Stallone would torpedo his career with the godawful Judge Dredd. Steven Seagal and Chuck Norris were practically direct-to-video by 1995 too. I distinctly remember Timecop being the last time I really saw JCVD in the world. The last time one of his films was heavily promoted, tied to merchandise and fast food, and widely distributed—the last movie of his I remember being everywhere. 

The Van Dammit Era (1994-2008)

Had I been JCVD’s manager and/or agent at the time, I might have been able to save him from a lot of this. Granted, I was ten, but even then, I could see exactly what they were trying to do with his career. Even though Street Fighter (1994) is roundly despised, it still took in close to a hundred million dollars at the box office. JCVD was still very profitable. But I think this was also the point in his life where his drug use was getting out of control. His reputation on film sets due to the drug use began to seriously sour. So, perhaps it was this, or an overall attempt at the time to soften violent action stars, but JCVD’s next movie, Sudden Death (1995), cast him as a father in attempt to give the otherwise cookie-cutter action movie you’ve seen a thousand times by this point an emotional center. I hated it. I could see the steep decline coming. Still, it doubled its budget at the box office. But it was clear Hollywood was running out of ideas for JCVD and so what do people often do when such is the case? They run back to the well. They return to what works. 

/Film has an amazing article on the oral history of Bloodsport released as a companion piece to the How Did This Get Made? podcast episode. ‘Based on a True Story’ is stenciled on Bloodsport’s film poster and at the closing of the film, there is a series of fight stats for, supposedly, the real guy the movie is based on, Frank Dux. There is a weird history surrounding Frank Dux. There’s significant evidence, compiled over the years, suggesting he essentially made everything up—not a single bit of it is true. /Film successfully interviewed him despite his reclusive reputation and I’ll leave everyone to draw their own judgments and conclusions. Still, with Bloodsport approaching its ten-year anniversary, and with a maybe semi-desperate, possibly coked out of his mind JCVD, he partnered once again with Frank Dux, and the two set out to ‘film the greatest martial arts movie ever made’, The Kumite. It ended in an extremely bitter lawsuit. The movie that was salvaged, for which Frank Dux got a ‘story by’ credit, was The Quest (1996). 

Return to the well, JCVD did. The Quest is almost a shot for shot remake of Bloodsport. They changed the era to the 1920’s and added a throwaway subplot where JCVD guards a group of orphan children but, otherwise, it’s exactly the same movie. I still love it. It co-stars Roger Moore and James Remar. Abdel Qissi, the heavy from Lionheart, returns to play the heavy again. Against all odds, the film was just as successful at the box office as Sudden Death and JCVD, remarkably, would follow it up with even another hit, (and I loved this era of action movies where it seemed like they all had to have a title like this) Maximum Risk (1996). It’s never easy to see your heroes struggle or fall from grace or start doing movies with Dennis Rodman but that’s where 1997 took JCVD with Double Team. Even I started getting tired of his movies by this point. And I was just disappointed, in general. Really? That’s what we’re doing with him now? Sticking him in movies with the ‘it guy of the moment’? Yep. Next, it was Rob Schneider’s turn in 1998’s Knock Off.

From there, JCVD’s movies made less and less money, bottoming out in 1999 with Universal Soldier: The Return which, even with the ‘it guy of the moment’ Bill Goldberg’s help, grossed only a quarter of its budget at the box office. The Matrix would come out the same year and change the landscape of action movies forever. And that new world really didn’t have a place for JCVD.

The Revival (2008-Present)

The independent film JCVD released in 2008 was met with the kind of critical acclaim JCVD perhaps never before received. I think it reminded everyone how much they missed him and reminded him how much he was loved, not just in the United States, but all over the world.

Quietly, a JCVD revival began to take hold. Even though he was mostly relegated to direct-to-video fare, there are a few jewels I would recommend. First, Sylvester Stallone really had a great idea in The Expendables franchise. None of them are great movies but the idea behind them, getting all of these older, forgotten action stars back together to blow some shit up, is a lot of fun.

In 2012, I attended Van Dammage: The Jean-Claude Van Damme Movie Marathon at Alamo Drafthouse, scheduled alongside the release of The Expendables 2. I had an awesome time and it was so cool to see so many people, a lot of them with their kids, there to see and celebrate JCVD. And I loved JCVD’s turn as the heavy in that movie. JCVD returned to the reboot of the Kickboxer franchise, this time playing the curmudgeon-y sensei. Those movies are the fun kind of terrible. And, last but not least, he got to star in the Amazon series Jean-Claude Van Johnson. Sadly, it only got one season and six episodes, but it is so fucking fun and wacky with its meta. If, like me, you’ve been a JCVD fan your entire life, it will crack you up in a singularly special kind of way.