{"id":2204,"date":"2024-08-09T13:50:21","date_gmt":"2024-08-09T13:50:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=2204"},"modified":"2024-10-14T14:27:57","modified_gmt":"2024-10-14T18:27:57","slug":"double-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/08\/09\/double-team\/","title":{"rendered":"Double Team"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Double Team <\/strong>(1997)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Columbia\/Action\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 93 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (violence and language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Tsui Hark\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Don Jakoby and Paul Mones\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Gary Chang\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Peter Pau\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: April 4, 1997 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dennis Rodman, Paul Freeman, Mickey Rourke, Natacha Lindinger, Valeria Cavalli.\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $11.4M (US)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: ***<\/p>\n

\u00a0Double Team<\/strong> has to be one of the most ridiculous action movies ever made. No, I take that back. It IS one of the most ridiculous action flicks ever made! How else can you describe a movie that co-stars NBA player Dennis Rodman? He\u2019s known as well for his skills on the court as he is his colorful personality and outrageous antics off the court. In Double Team<\/strong>, he plays Yaz, an arms dealer who works out of a sex club in the red light district of Antwerp. This guy stocks military hardware so new he doesn\u2019t even know he has it. He\u2019s also not accustomed to sticking out his neck for anybody (the similarities to Rick Blaine begin and end here) but he still joins JCVD\u2019s character in his attempts to take down international terrorist Stavros (Rourke, Angel Heart). It\u2019s the strangest pairing since Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett in Saturn 3 (1980). What\u2019s even stranger is that it sort of works in an ultra-weird kind of way.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Van Damme plays Quinn, a CIA agent called out of retirement to nail his archnemesis Stavros. He reluctantly takes the assignment which, of course, goes horribly wrong, resulting in the deaths of several agents and Stavros\u2019 six-year-old son. The two men fight (in a hospital maternity ward!) and Quinn gets knocked unconscious. He wakes up in a place called \u201cThe Colony\u201d, a combination penal island and think tank where secret agents \u201ctoo valuable to kill but too dangerous to set free\u201d are sent after colossal screw-ups like Quinn\u2019s. The Colony is invisible to radar and supposedly escape-proof. Each day, the agents sit at computers and analyze terroristic threats. This is how Quinn finds out Stavros has kidnapped his pregnant wife (who thinks he\u2019s dead).<\/p>\n

\u00a0Remember what I said about The Colony being escape-proof? Quinn manages to escape and make his way back to Antwerp where he reconnects with Yaz (he sold him weapons for the botched mission). Yaz agrees to help him find Stavros and retrieve his wife in exchange for access to secret CIA bank accounts. The two go to Rome where Stavros intends to kill Quinn out of revenge for his son\u2019s death. The climactic death match takes place in the Colosseum (it was actually filmed in the Arles Amphitheatre in France but never mind) and involves land mines and a tiger. Yes, it plays just as bizarre as it sounds. It\u2019s kind of fun though. The whole movie is, really.<\/p>\n

\u00a0To think, I hated Double Team<\/strong> the first time I saw it (April 1, 1997). Was it coincidental or intentional that the prerelease screening took place on April Fools\u2019 Day? That\u2019s what I was thinking as I left the theater. A movie this bad has to be a joke, right? And it is bad, no two ways about it. The story makes no sense. The acting and dialogue are awful. It\u2019s wildly edited. But it\u2019s all part of the movie\u2019s appeal. The very things that should work against it actually work in its favor. Double Team<\/strong> is one those so-bad-it\u2019s-great movies.<\/p>\n

\u00a0We all know Van Damme can\u2019t act. He can fight, but he has the emotional range of a piece of driftwood. Thankfully, he never seems to take himself too seriously. Well, Rodman makes JCVD look like a master thespian. I\u2019m not even sure what he does in Double Team<\/strong> qualifies as a performance. He essentially plays himself; the only difference is that he handles weaponry instead of a ball. His hair color changes from scene to scene. His dialogue consists mainly of basketball references. Example: \u201cIt\u2019s time to get off the bench!\u201d and \u201cThe best defense is a strong offense.\u201d In one scene, Quinn and Yaz jump from a plane inside something that looks like a giant basketball. Double Team<\/strong> is filled with weird scenes like this. At one point, they receive help from an order of monks with a subterranean computer set-up that would make Bill Gates jealous. It leads to a scene in a catacomb where Rodman attempts to hit a detonator with a human skull. When he misses, he says, \u201cOops! Air ball!\u201d Okay, LOL, very funny.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I\u2019m not even sure what to say about Rourke as Stavros. His performance is almost as weird as Rodman\u2019s in that it\u2019s indescribable. It\u2019s not one of those OTT deals you normally see in movies like this. He\u2019s more of a charm-meets-slime kind of guy. Rourke underplays it to a certain degree, but there\u2019s still a fair amount of menace to his character. How would you describe a guy who brings a newborn baby to a fight involving land mines and a prowling tiger? Oh, I almost forgot. Paul Freeman, Indiana Jones\u2019 chief rival in Raiders of the Lost Ark, plays Goldsmythe, the fellow Colony resident sent to kill Quinn after his amazing escape. He adds a strong dose of camp to the proceedings.<\/p>\n

\u00a0One thing Double Team<\/strong> doesn\u2019t lack is action. There\u2019s plenty of it starting with the opening sequence in which Quinn drives a truck load of stolen plutonium through Croatia and crashes it through a freight train. The fight choreography is quite good. The action scenes are as cool as they are preposterous. There are a lot of \u201cYeah, right!\u201d moments but my favorite has to be when our heroes shield themselves from an explosion with a Coke vending machine. There are a lot of visible product placements for Coke in Double Team<\/strong>. I thought the soft drink company no longer owned the studio (they sold it to Sony in \u201989).<\/p>\n

\u00a0I\u2019m not saying Double Team<\/strong> is a great movie or an action classic. It\u2019s neither. It is a lot of fun even if it doesn\u2019t make a lot of sense. Directed by Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark (A Chinese Ghost Story), it\u2019s like a live-action cartoon. It\u2019s colorful, fast-moving and silly. It has fight scenes, shoot-outs, car chases and explosions. Double Team<\/strong> is junk food for the brain. It provides zero nutrition, but it sure tastes good.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Double Team (1997)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Columbia\/Action\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 93 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (violence and language)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Tsui Hark\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Don Jakoby and Paul Mones\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Gary Chang\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Peter Pau\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: April 4, 1997 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dennis Rodman, Paul Freeman, Mickey Rourke, Natacha Lindinger, Valeria Cavalli.\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $11.4M (US) Rating: *** \u00a0Double Team […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3112,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-kick-ass-actioners"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Double-Team-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2204"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3113,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204\/revisions\/3113"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}