By the time George Clooney came around all long-lashed and smirky in the mid-‘90s, you just knew the days of the action star were numbered. Sure, people still wanted to see that compulsory string of explosions and ballet of blazing cars pirouetting in the air, but the man in the foreground, sweat and bravado glistening from his skin, couldn’t just be armed and almost-immortal to save both the day and audience interest.
The “Muscles from Brussels,” the Zen gall of Seagal, the stone-cold warfare of Stallone — all the big screen’s one-man killing machines that relied on the Eastwood-ian action hero’s motto of “I think I have bigger balls, therefore I am indestructible” just needed to bring the inner pain a little more. It wasn’t enough for a merciless mercenary or vendetta-driven ex-CIA agent to whip out their martial art of choice and unleash the fury. There had to be some thought to it as well.
Getting Some Action — Or Not
While the formulaic action vehicle was souped up to accommodate unlikely heroes with lash-batting vulnerability, Tarantino geek wit, and big-busted chicks that could bust balls as well, the alpha male action star was soon banished to the realm of direct-to-video. Of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger had to be exempted from this man-beast exile. Even if no one could really spell his surname, a successful crossover to comedy, thanks to Danny Devito (Twins), and being able to tie the knot with Kennedy kin will get you from Terminator to “Governator” as fast as you can say “Get to the choppahh!” And come on, if you’re an action star who plays an action hero in a movie called Last Action Hero, you’re rolling with the self-aware times of “girlie men” like Kurt Kobain (Then again, Arnie’s pre-Obaman admission of past pot-smoking also meant he was ahead of the times).
Chuck Norris, Van Damme, Seagal — who would kick whose ass? You can almost imagine a semi-serious debate between buddies in latter-day action pics Bad Boys, Rush Hour, or, well, pretty much any flick born from the terminally adolescent brain of Judd Apatow; a bunch of dorks and schlubs passing around a bong and getting all fired up over their chosen action star’s ass-whooping abilities.
When geeks started romanticizing, intellectualizing, and parodying every ridiculous catchphrase and absurd action of the action star, the big names carrying the loaded profession had become pop cultural jokes. And their lives away from shooting blanks and fight choreography didn’t help the fallen “hero” stigma either: Jean-Claude getting trashed and roaming the sidewalk of an LA nightclub half-naked; Sly bagging a Razzie that categorizes most of his contemporaries: “Worst Actor of the Century;” Seagal finding “gold in the Philippines.”
Yet while a Japanese ad for a caffeine genki drink and a totally random guest appearance in Celebrity Guide to Wine are cited in an ode to the oeuvre of Tanduay’s most prolific endorser, Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal does not mention his golden moment of local rum glorification. The book does, however, go into detail about Steven Seagal’s golden days, from shoving Tommy Lee Jones’s head into a monitor in Under Siege, to singing the blues (literally in his own blues band) and getting more action on straight-to-DVD shelves. “Mainstream acceptance seemed unattainable, plagued as he was with criticisms of weight gain, increasing reliance on stunt doubles and voiceovers. But he traveled around Europe and Asia making a series of highly distinctive, low budget movies... and then he started drinking goji berry juice and playing the blues,” writes Vern, the one-named thinking stoner’s film critic, in his introduction to a tome whose praise for the ponytailed mystic and hurler of movies titled Today You Die and lines like “I’m gonna take you to the bank... to the blood bank” almost passes for disguised humoring. And to think the goal of Seagal’s movies, as he’s mentioned in interviews, is to “bring people forward into contemplation.”
Beaten Down, Getting Up
Maybe it had to take some contemplation for people to give a damn about a guy like Van Damme again. Well, on his part, at least. With JCVD as VD’s latest film (released in the US late last year), the actor’s initials give the film — the culmination of all of his probable contemplation — an impacting stamp. Instead of Jean-Claude breaking a roundhouse kick out against bar brawlers or extra-dirty politicians, he brings it upon himself, taking on the role of a down-and-out action movie veteran who returns to his native Brussels broke, stripped of roles (they all went to Seagal after he “promised to cut his ponytail off”) and of his daughter’s custody. Essentially, Van Damme plays himself, but with the extra baggage of being caught in the middle of a bank heist that he becomes marked as a suspect of.
Brussels, where Jean-Claude is still revered as its pec-flexing pride, becomes his Ghost of Christmas Past, Present, and Future — a catalyst to the man’s catharsis. Though he renders himself a refreshing spectacle by learning to poke fun at himself — a Belgian taxi driver berating him and bank robbers taunting him for his real-life inability to bust a kickboxing move — some of his admissions in the film are as bleak as his pasty, age-weathered mug on the JCVD movie poster. “I’m 47 years old and it’s very difficult for me to do everything in one shot,” he gasps to an Asian director who drops him in a strenuous single-take action sequence.
More than a meta-magnanimous way of letting viewers know that yes, Van Damme knows what you think of him, the sharp point in the movie is that, well, Van Damme actually cares. It’s a five-and-a-half-minute monologue delivered at the end of JCVD that is his cool penance — confessing, with tears and hands pressed together, the many errors of his ego: snorting the coke of fame, screwing women over, becoming an animal hungry for validation. “Van Damme the beast, the tiger in the cage...” he muses, while holed up in the bank. “I was wasted mentally and physically.”
That reviews for JCVD made it its tragic hero’s most critically acclaimed film — “[Van Damme] has never seemed more convincing” said USA Today — is no surprise. The Belgian he-man’s fall from grace could just as well point to an America, once hot-blooded and virile, that has succumbed to the same. Action cinema went with its excess, obesity, and all the meatheads knocking their Buds back to what a damn good nation they’ve got. ‘Course, the beast just had to break down some time.
But America’s the land of second chances — for action stars, for men, for itself, even — and the rise of Mickey Rourke is proof of that. From promising face of tough guys in the ‘80s to poster boy of muddled cosmetic surgery and arrested development in the ‘90s (DUIs, spousal abuse, etc.), Rourke became Hollywood’s prodigal son, holding up this season’s “comeback kid” banner with The Wrestler. The Golden Globes, the Oscars — everyone gave him a bro-hug for playing an “old, broken-down piece of meat” still chasing acclaim in a “sport” that seemed to have hung its tights up in the ‘90s; not too far from being an old, washed-up piece of shit actor himself.
It was a role that required Rourke to get bruised up, more by surrendering to his raging past and claiming some inner peace within than all the wrangling retakes he had to fulfill. What was accomplished was less an acting feat and more his own unbearable scourge of admission and acceptance, just like America’s own stab at self-forgiveness by lionizing him once again. After all, whether fallen hero or beast, redemption meets he who can evolve into a man of action.