| Double Team (1997) Cast:Jean-Claude Van Damme,Mickey Rourke,Dennis Rodman Jean-Claude Van Damme teams up with Dennis Rodman to take down Mickey Rourke, an international terrorist who has Van Damme's pregnant wife hostage and since Van Damme is persumed dead and is forced to work in a CIA think tank, he must escape to rescue her from Rourke and enlist Rodman for his help in this utterly atrocious actioner which features the worst actor to ever appear in a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie; Dennis Rodman. Now when you consider every bad actor that was in a Jean-Claude Van Damme, you have thesps from No Retreat No Surrender and Cyborg, you also have Sho Kosugi, Dolph Lundgren(To be fair Dolph is a better thesp than Jean-Claude), Jeff Speakman, Billy Blanks and Dennis Alexio, all of them are oscar winners when compared to Rodman who doesn't even try and give a performance of any kind. Worst of all he's openly annoying (just like on the basketball court when he used to play.) and makes even Jean-Claude Van Damme seem like the next coming of George C. Scott. Of course with a cast that includes Dennis Rodman one went in with low expectations but this movie is so uttelry terrible that one is lost for words in how awful it is. For instance the colony part is never explained that well and Van Damme's MacGuyver like antics make this even more hokey than it looks on paper. The action sequences are okay but it's really Mickey Rourke's decent bad guy role which provides Double Team with it's only watchable edge. But even that can't save it from it's horrible basketball refrences which have Van Damme and Rodman reciting. To wit: J.C:"Offense gets the glory!" D.R:"But defense wins the game!" . And of course sadly, much more. Indeed this is the movie that killed Van Damme's theatrical career, after this nobody took him seriously and with crap like this it's hard not to see why. D.Tsui Hark * |