Amazon’s policy of hurling its pilots online and letting them fend for themselves has created some interesting orphans along the way. For every Transparent there’s been a Down Dog or a Hysteria or an A History of Radness, a doomed-to-be-forgotten shot at greatness that withered in public because it failed to hit the heights of, say, Bosch.
I cannot emphasise what I’m about to say enough: Jean-Claude Van Johnson must not be allowed to become one of those orphans. It is far too bonkers to go out like that.
The premise is this: waning movie star Jean-Claude Van Damme decides to revive his career as an international spy, using the production of his awful East European bargain-bin action movies as cover. He’s not as spry as he once was, but just as vain, and whatever victories he scrapes are entirely despite himself. It’s Johnny English, essentially, but with the added fascination of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s ongoing self-awareness.
This is not the first time Van Damme has played himself. He starred in 2008’s JCVD, a Belgian film where a barely fictionalised Van Damme gets caught up in a bank robbery and forlornly laments his lot in life. He was the subject of an ITV4 reality show, Jean-Claude Van Damme: Behind Closed Doors, in 2011. Then there are all the endless commercials, for Coors and GoDaddy and Volvo, in which all pretence of character are abandoned. He only seems happy, it seems, when in a state of self-examination.
Even so, Jean-Claude Van Johnson ratchets up the self-mockery to previously unexplored heights. Van Damme opens the pilot by introducing himself – “I used to be super famous”, he says, before adding “Maybe you’ve seen Timecop, which is like Looper but like a million times better” – while an enemy charges at him with a baton. Van Damme attempts to dodge him, fails, and gets battered in the head as the result.
The real life Van Damme is a complicated character – I was once granted an interview with him, which was downgraded to a phone interview, which was then downgraded to an email interview, which he responded to with a series of distracted one-word answers – and you get the sense that all this public self-examination is his attempt to understand himself as much as anything else. Thankfully, though, a lot of the pilot plays this tendency for laughs.
The show portrays Van Damme as both an out-of-touch Hollywood nimrod – coconut water runs through his shower – and a dinosaur unable to comprehend the whirlwind of pop-up restaurants and clueless vapers that have suddenly appeared from nowhere. It’s also brimming with references to his old films, most noticeably in a scene that manages to simultaneously riff on Timecop and Double Impact, and action movies in general. When a crowd of baddies begin to charge at him en masse at the episode’s climax, for instance, their leader stops them, shouting “No no no, one at a time or you’ll run into each other. Could get confusing.”
Jean-Claude Van Johnson has some stiff competition this Amazon pilot season – it’s up against a new series by the creator of Transparent and a promising superhero spoof – but I’m certain it has more promise than the others combined. If the quality of this first outing can be maintained, then in time Jean-Claude Van Johnson might become something special. Who knows, it might even save Jean-Claude Van Damme himself.
