Double Impact (1991)

This week’s selection for the Fridays of Fury Action Club, see upcoming movies and join here

Double Impact is a 1991 action movie starring Jean Claude Van Damme in a dual role. This was the start of a weird sub-genre for Van Damme. It was the first of two times he would play long-lost identical twins, then he has another movie where he plays clones (Replicant), and one where he plays a character and his descendant (The Order). It was directed by Sheldon Lettich, a frequent Van Damme collaborator. Lettich had written Bloodsport for Van Damme, based on the insane fabrications of famous karate liar Frank Dux. Then Lettich directed and co-wrote (with Van Damme) Lionheart before doing the same on Double Impact. 

The movie starts in 1966 Hong Kong, at the opening of the Victoria Harbour Tunnel. One of the businessmen involved, Nigel Griffith (Alan Scarfe) has ties with crime boss Raymond Zhang (Philip Chan). They send a gang to murder Griffith’s business partner and his family. The man and his wife are brutally gunned down by a gang led by Moon (Bolo Big Boy Yeung, final boss O.G. Chong Li from Bloodsport). The family’s bodyguard Frank Avery (Geoffrey Lewis) arrives in time to save the couple’s infant twins and injure Moon so that he will have a cool scar later. In the chaos their nanny escapes with one baby and takes it to a Hong Kong orphanage, Frank takes the other one.

Coincidentally, this is the third Action Club movie in a row featuring Geoffrey Lewis. He had a fairly thankless role as a sheriff in Joshua Tree with a decent amount of screen time, then he had an even smaller perfunctory role as a cop boss in Tango & Cash. This time around he gets second billing in the cast. Not only is he central to the plot, he gets in on the action as well. Lewis gets to drive and shoot at the same time, wield assault and sniper rifles, he even gets the colorful torture scene that so frequently happens to the hero/heroes in 80s/early 90s action movies (see Tango & Cash again for an example). At first Lewis is wearing a toupee like in T & C, but that is just so that he can take it off and go bald to show 25 years have passed since the flashback. His gruff and colorful demeanor is one of the movie’s strengths.

Lewis, Geoffrey Lewis

you could probably cut a trailer of this where Lewis looks like the hero

The twins grow up into Jean Claude Van Dammes. Chad(!) was raised by “Uncle” Frank, and they run a martial arts dojo together in Los Angeles. Adult Chad is introduced teaching an aerobics class/giving a gynecological exam to a woman in a ridiculously revealing leotard (actress/model Julie Strain). I haven’t watched a Van Damme movie of this vintage in a long time, but I remembered he loved showing off his ass and his splits. I think he even did a naked split in Time Cop? He might as well be naked here, as he does an extended split in his skintight spandex workout tights with multiple shots lovingly centered on his ass. My wife was confused as to why this was supposed to be sexy for the women in his class or the audience, saying that the splits are not what she wants to see muscle-bound dudes doing. Chad also gets to demonstrate his kicking skills on a mouthy martial arts student. Someone shows Frank a picture of adult Alex, now a black market criminal in Hong Kong, and Frank tells Chad they are going there on business.

For reasons known only to Frank, he tells Chad he is not really his uncle, but doesn’t tell him about twin brother Alex. Instead he sends Chad (looking like a dipshit with his polo shirt tucked into his pink shorts) into a shady mahjong parlor where Alex does his shady business.

gee whiz mister, all this money's for me?

Frank encourages Chad to look like even more of a dipshit (to be fair, that doesn’t take much encouraging), as Chad accepts money from random threatening men and then goes off to get some over-the-silk-underwear hand action from Alex’s unknowing girlfriend Danielle (Alonna Shaw). That’s when an enraged Alex arrives and calls Chad a f****t for the first but unfortunately not the last time. I guess Frank just wanted to have some laughs at their expense? This initial misunderstanding sets up what is (unfortunately) the biggest recurring conflict between the twins, Alex thinking that Chad is trying to/has had sex with Alex’s girlfriend. I guess Alex has never heard the philosophy of “long lost identical twin bros before hos.” Frank tells them their origin story and that they should own half the tunnel or something? More importantly, it gives them someone to get revenge on for the parents they just found out were murdered. Alex’s dealings mean he already knows crime boss Zhang, and coincidentally Danielle has worked for businessman Griffith for years.

Frank and the boys set up shop in an abandoned seaside building by the jungle. There are various missions to mess with the bad guys’ operations, and various scenes of mistaken identity all resulting in beatdowns, shootouts, and explosions. The initially skeptical Danielle begins investigating her boss, and her snooping is noticed by Griffith’s Security Dominatrix (bodybuilder Cory Everson).

When Danielle calls for help, Frank and Alex are dicking around in the jungle, so Chad runs off to save her and they have a big chase scene. Unable to contact them, Alex immediately starts chugging liquor and thinking about his brother and his girlfriend fucking in hilariously overblown soft porn imagery. This has got to be the only movie where the hero’s sex scene takes place entirely in the nightmare/fantasy of his twin brother.

They get back and Alex immediately hits Danielle and drops another f-bomb on Chad. This is already pretty shitty for one of the “heroes” of a 1991 movie, but it is exacerbated by Alex never even trying to apologize for hitting Danielle before they inevitably get back together later. The brothers split up, and Frank and Danielle get abducted leading to the big climax.

That climax isn’t great, but along with the rest of the action it was good enough to help raise my opinion of the movie from “meh” to average. The fight choreography (by Van Damme) and shootouts are more fun than many big American action pictures of the era, but pale in comparison to the Hong Kong fare they were obviously inspired by. The fighting is also hobbled by too much cutting and slow motion. Nothing really builds a rhythm, you just get some cool moves every now and then before Bolo’s barrel-fu.

In the following years there was an exodus to Hollywood from the Hong Kong film industry as they prepared for Hong Kong’s 1997 handover from British to Chinese control. Van Damme would take advantage of this to collaborate with legendary directors like John Woo, Ringo Lam, and Tsui Hark who brought much more style and energy to his action scenes.

The funniest part of the movie is the absolutely terrible looking composite shots of dual Van Dammes. They must have realized how shitty they looked, because they only included a few shots of them both with faces visible in the frame over the entire movie. I feel like I saw TV shows pulling off this gimmick many times back then, it's baffling that it looks this bad in a $15 million movie where it is the central conceit.

So why make the twin movie, then? According to Van Damme, he wanted audiences to expand their idea of him beyond just a martial arts guy and see his acting because "[Alex] is violent and [Chad] is not, so audiences [will] see the contrast in my work." Except of course, Chad still has to fight and shoot people constantly throughout the movie. Van Damme’s acting wouldn’t have been up to the challenge of subtle differences back then, but even considering that the script leaned too far into making Alex a dick and Chad a dipshit. You want the dichotomy to be tough brother/nice brother, not abusive asshole/smiling simpleton. Van Damme would eventually become a better actor after years of struggling with his career, relationships, and drug addiction taught him some humility and extended his acting range beyond cocaine confidence and kicking.

By cosmic coincidence, the same day I planned to watch this was the same day I finally had a chance to see Sinners in theaters. Thanks to a delay, I had to stop the climax of Double Impact to leave and catch Sinners’ showtime, then came home and finished Double Impact. So literally in the middle of watching some of the shittiest dual-actor compositing ever released in theaters, I went and watched some of the most seamless and extensive doubling work ever. It isn’t fair to compare the two because technology has changed so much, but it was still funny to me that Sinners could freely and seamlessly mingle two Michael B. Jordans constantly, but Double Impact struggled just to have two Van Dammes sit on the same couch.  

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