Director: Julien Leclercq

Writer: Jérémie Guez

Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Sveva Alviti, Sami Bouajila, Sam Louwyck, Kaaris, Kevin Janssens, Alice Verset, Dimitri Thivaios, Laurent D’Elia

Running Time: 82 min.

By LP Hugo

While many film critics and casual filmgoers seem to date Jean-Claude Van Damme’s first true flexing of his acting muscles back to Mabrouk El Mechri’s JCVD in 2008, the Belgian action star has actually always been a bonafide actor, with a wide range of performances that have taken him across many shades of good and evil, of comedy and drama, of intensity and playfulness. Of course, arriving to such a conclusion necessitates piercing through a sometimes thick cloud of overblown 80s and 90s heroics, a haze of coke-induced antics in the early 00s, a whole lot of direct-to-video mediocrity since then, and a handful of hilarious commercials. Yet to dismiss Van Damme as an actor is often to prove unable to dissociate a performance from the film in which it is found (simply put: fine acting can happen even with poor scripts), and to deride him is entirely redundant: he’s already deriding himself on a regular basis.

Still, 2008’s JCVD at least made his acting chops and aching vulnerability evident by being mostly devoid of actions scenes – the arthouse veneer that seems to coat French or Belgian films whenever they travel internationally (even when the film has no arthouse pretentions in its home country) helped, of course. Since then, Van Damme has kept doing some of his best work as an actor (the weary and then demented return of Luc Devereaux in John Hyams’ excellent Universal Soldier sequels, the self-deprecating and heartfelt meta version of himself in the Amazon series Jean-Claude Van Johnson…) while strengthening his pop culture good-will (voice work in the Kung-Fu Panda films, a villain named Vilain in The Expendables 2…) and starring in a string of mediocre-to-solid but cripplingly cash-strapped direct-to-video thrillers (Pound of Flesh, Kill ‘em All…). Now, he goes back to French-speaking cinema with Julien Leclercq’s The Bouncer (aka Lukas), whose muted reception in France doesn’t mean it won’t resonate internationally: after all, JCVD similarly made few waves on its home turf, before acquiring a strong reputation abroad.

Van Damme plays Lukas, a former bodyguard who for initially mysterious reasons fled South Africa alone with his 8 year-old daughter (Alice Verset), to start a new life under fake names in Belgium, where he works as a bouncer, trying to make ends meet and give his daughter a brighter future. One day, he nearly kills a troublesome clubber by accident: he’s fired but finds a new bouncer position in a strip club whose shady owner Dekkers (Sam Louwyck) is intrigued by his stoic resilience: the job interview consisted of beating up a room-full of men half his age. But soon, Lukas is approached by police detective Zeroual (Sami Bouajila), who’s aware of his recent misstep, is trying to nail Dekkers for money counterfeiting, and needs an informant. The bouncer must get his hands dirty to earn his new boss’ trust and graduate to henchman, a position from which he can tip-off the police, and avoid prison. But inevitably, his daughter gets caught in the crossfire, and things get ugly.

This is a gritty film. In fact, it is so gritty that it sometimes borders on parody: the low thumps and deep industrial growls of the soundtrack, the endless pregnant silences, the dour Belgian suburban landscapes, the absolute absence of humour… The film almost crumbles under the weight of its atmosphere, especially as it doesn’t have much a script to support it. It’s a perfunctory story, a repetitive succession of simple family moments and scenes where Lukas goes on quick missions for his new boss, while feeding information to Zeroual. Lukas’ mysterious past, when revealed, proves too mundane to warrant how long it took to unravel it, and a twist in the final reel lands with a thud, as it involves a character that has had no room for development until then. And there is a frankly stupid plot turn where Lukas actually takes his daughter along on one of the dangerous, illegal jobs he has to do for his crime-lord boss… Sure, Dekkers summoned him while he was having some quality time with his daughter, but why didn’t he drop her off at home? Because then she couldn’t have been kidnapped easily enough, that’s why.

Nevertheless, this is one of Van Damme’s best performances. He’s of course never more comfortable acting than in his native French, but the dialogue is sparse here. It’s his grizzled face, his deeply melancholy eyes that tell the story, and the subtleties of warmth, anger or despair they convey are the main reasons to watch The Bouncer. He’s well-matched by Sam Louwyck, imposingly dangerous and yet at times oddly sympathetic as the crime boss Lukas must help take down. And Alice Verset has a touching chemistry with Van Damme as his daughter, though the film confines said chemistry to a few small vignettes. The Bouncer is more film noir than action film, but it does offer a handful of very grounded, sometimes impressively brutal hand-to-hand fights, as well as an interesting tracking shot stealthily entering and noisily escaping a drug den; a quick parking lot chase is much less memorable. The Bouncer doesn’t hinder Van Damme’s slow, diluted comeback, but it doesn’t advance it much either.

LP Hugo’s Rating: 5.5/10

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