Summary: While at home in Belgium, Jean-Claude Van Damme (self) is taken hostage along with several others in a daylight post office robbery.This movie is cool. It's not perfect, it's not even particularly substantial, but, for a mediation on fame and responsibility, it's cool.
The movie makes a point of drawing a direct parallel with Dog Day Afternoon (Zinedine Soualem is styled to look exactly like John Cazale) though it's unclear where it wants to go with that parallel, which is pretty much the problem. I found the jumbled time line, lighting, and photography closer to Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.* It's a good movie to ape, although I think the time line (i.e., release date to release date) makes it unlikely that that's what co-writer and director Mabrouk El Mechri and co-writers Fédéric Bénudis and Christophe Turpin had in mind. Too bad.
What happens to a person when you become less of a box office draw and more of a punchline is enough fodder for a movie to begin with, so you'd think that adding the hostage twist to the story of a former action star would be over the top. Somehow, though, it's not. Somehow it feels just right.
Van Damme plays the role just right as well. It's not something you could imagine happening to Stallone or Segal. There's a certain resigned air that he carries from the outside world into the situation that suits him there. He worries for his own life, he wonders how he can use a robber's fan worship against him, he tries to help the other hostages inasmuch as he can. But mostly he takes it all in with a kind of sighed, "I suppose it was always going to be this way." It's effecting, so much so that even as your rational side recognizes the obvious manipulations behind his big monologue, you find yourself moved. By his "oh, yeah, that" head tap at the end of the movie, it's hard not to smile wryly in agreement. B-
*Huh - those are both Sidney Lumet movies. Wonder what that's about.
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