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Jean-Claude Van Damme in Jean-Claude Van Johnson.
Jean-Claude Van Damme in Jean-Claude Van Johnson. Photograph: Ep/Amazon/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
Jean-Claude Van Damme in Jean-Claude Van Johnson. Photograph: Ep/Amazon/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

Jean-Claude Van Johnson review – a baggy, wildly oscillating mess

This article is more than 6 years old

This campy self-parody centred on Jean-Claude Van Damme is let down by poor writing and direction. It’s a waste of everyone’s time

What is it? A “comedy” featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme as Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Why you’ll love it: If you are former action hero Jean-Claude Van Damme, you will adore this six-part television programme about and starring you. It’s six half-hours of you kicking ass like in the old days, staring intently into a much younger woman’s eyes like in the old days and generally saving the day.

Brought out of retirement for one last job, JCVD is revealed to have really been a black-ops spy all along who uses his movie roles as a cover for espionage. So this is going to be a camp, outrageous ride that treads the careful line between self-parody and still flattering its star. Right? Stupid can be fun if everyone agrees to fully commit to the stupid.

Except what showrunner David Callaham gives us is an over-caffeinated, directionless, amateurish botch that wastes all the talent involved. In the writing, and Peter Atencio’s direction, there is serious confusion over whether they’re going for the pompous tone of JCVD’s old movies and allowing the laughs to naturally erupt from the seriousness, or something more slapstick. Do have that meeting, guys.

Comedy has rules and camp isn’t as easy as it looks. Ignore those rules or forget to put in place the essential scaffolding and you’ll produce a baggy, wildly oscillating mess: one minute Van Damme is hilariously driving around a parking lot, blindfolded, the next we see a baddie walk towards him before inexplicably and graphically shooting himself in the head, or our star breaking down over his tragic childhood in an orphanage.

Once an episode there is a moment of comic stupidity where JCVD will fall over or set something on fire, turning him into a low-status buffoon before he quickly returns to the brooding alpha role. Pick a tone. This show has the attention span of a moth in a lightbulb factory.

There are glimpses of what it could have been with the frequent references to Van Damme’s film career, virtual winks to camera and the high campery of a new movie project, an action version of Huckleberry Finn in which Tom Sawyer is a sexy woman wielding a magical paintbrush. But the rest of the series is heavily padded with a romantic subplot featuring old girlfriend and fellow spy Vanessa (a valiant Kat Foster) and some nonsense about a supervillain trying to conquer the world with a weather-controlling device.

The journey Callaham took to get this to screen can only be imagined, but I’m picturing a lot of desk-banging and hell-yeah-ing as boggle-eyed Amazon execs check with each other to see if it this an amazing idea or actually unhinged.

Find the camp in a situation and let it sing, by all means. But do not force camp through a sieve because it always shows. Maybe the voguishness of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room and James Franco’s subsequent Wiseau biopic The Disaster Artist has prepared the ground for a return of the so-bad-it’s-good genre, but Jean-Claude Van Johnson lands in a crumpled heap quite some way off.

Length: Six half-hour episodes available now.

Stand-out episode: The final one, in which Van Damme plays three different versions of himself and enacts a Time Cop-style plot takes some beating in the stupidity stakes.

If you liked Jean-Claude Van Johnson watch: The Comeback (Amazon, iTunes, YouTube etc), a far superior career-revival comedy from Friends’ Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King. It’s a masterpiece.

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