Review of Double Impact (1985) by Vance M — 29 May 2010

Me and some buddies of mine were reminicing about the glory days of cheesy action flicks, and after having some nostalgia thinking about them, we decided we were going to have a day dedicated to our favorite of the ridiculous action heroes of the late 80s-90s: Jean Claude Van Damme! We decided to create what we call DAMME SUNDAY (it must be spelled in all caps to match the manliness of The Van Damme), with our goal being to watch every Van Damme movie in history over the course of the summer. Knowing that these movies were trash and would not live up to our childhood memories, we still were brave enough to tackle three flicks by The Van Damme in one day (keep an eye out for my reviews of Death Warrant and Street Fighter as well)!

With that out of the way, on to the review. I am going to go ahead and say that these reviews will be short because, well, there is not exactly a ton of depth to a Van Damme feature. Double Impact is my personal favorite JCVD film because you get double the Damme for your buck, as The Van Damme plays two rolls in the film. The story (not that is really matters) is about two twins that are separted at birth due to their parents murder, and ultimately they come back together to reclaim their legacy and avenge their folks. The Van Damme plays both of the twins, and both of them, despite growing up on opposite sides of the world, are masters of martial arts! What a coincidence!!!!! Oh, but the awesomeness does not stop there! They are both expert marksmen who never have to reload their guns (seriously, bad boy Van Damme shoots at least 150 bullets out of his 9MM handguns before reloading in one scene)!!! The other remarkable thing is that they both have the same finishing move; the trademark Van Damme jump kick. Few things are more feared in the universe!

The plot to this movie pretty much sucks, and many of the scenes could be altogether thrown out because they do not advance the thin story in any way at all. That said, if you are watching this movie, you do not care about a great plot, you just want to See The Van Damme hand out ass whoopin's like candy at Halloween, and this he does lots of! The Van Damme gives out the ass whoopin's left and right in this flick, using everything in his path (even his enemies heads!) as weapons, as well as mowing his enemies down with ungodly good accuracy despite shooting not only from the hip, but one handed. This is rather impressive considering they are facing what seems to be a literal army.

When it comes down to it, this is really one of The Van Damme's better flicks, and if you are watching this looking for a cheesy action flick (like I was), then it is actually a pretty good guilty pleasure, but as an overall film, it fails.