“Take your fancy clothes and your black silk underwear and go back to Disneyland.”

Justin’s rating: I wonder if they chew Doublemint gum?

Justin’s review: I don’t find myself gravitating toward Jean-Claude Van Damme ’90s output because of his nuanced acting, Academy Award wins, cocaine usage, or his bizarre fixation on making us watch him do the splits. No, it’s the fact that JCVD picked a lot of entertaining projects that made for some really fun action flicks — undead cyborg soldier, time-traveling cop, Die Hard at a hockey game, video game hero, human hunting, and something with tigers.

So let’s add another one of his masterworks to our site, the one where he played his own twin: Double Impact. I’m sure he figured that there was no one up to his level, so he might as well be his own co-star.

When their parents get murdered in Hong Kong back when they were babies, Chad (Van Damme) and Alex (also Van Damme) are split up and raised separately without knowledge of each other. This fact comes as a little bit of a surprise when, 25 years later, they discover each other as they uncover the truth behind their parents’ assassination.

Chad’s a goofy karate instructor from California, while Alex is more of a cigar-chewing thug who stayed behind in Hong Kong. They’re not fast friends at the start, but what brothers tend to be? Eventually they put aside their differences to bring double kickboxing and dual-pistoling pain to the bad guys.

And the bad guys are pretty memorable, especially Killer Thighs Lady and Bloodsport’s Bolo Yeung (with a wicked facial scar) keeping the pressure on.

Word on the street is that Double Impact was kind of a Double Dragon video game adaptation without the official licensing (more so than 1994’s admittedly entertaining conversion). And yeah, I can see it. The eastern backdrop, rough street fights mixed with martial arts, and simple “team up and fight gangs until you get to the end boss” plot.

What we get here is a shade of the Hong Kong martial arts movie craze that was just starting to make inroads into mainstream western cinema (and would only be more so when John Woo arrived in the states) with two main characters trying to split our attention but not having much chemistry with each other. In short, it’s fine basic action with way too much cheesy slow-mo, but it’s nothing spectacular.

This movie entered into a 1991 summer season already packed with some very heavy hitting action flicks. It got a little bit steamrolled but still made twice its budget, was the 22nd highest earner during that period, and kept Van Damme moving upward in Hollywood to bigger and better and sillier things.

So the question is, do you want to watch JCVD’s stepping stone? Maybe you do. But when I get around to ranking all of his ’90s films — and oh I will — I can tell you that Double Impact is going to have a hard time climbing out of the bottom.

Intermission!

• Yeah. I had to see that splits scene, and now you have to too. Deal with it.
• Those are horrible baby outfits
• Dang, killing a mom in front of the kids, that’s cold
• That is very early ’90s music and tons of frosted glass cubes
• So is he paid to molest these girls at the gym
• Alex doesn’t lose the cigar when he’s fighting
• Want to stop a boat from following you? Toss some cars in the water and shoot at them until they blow up and the boats really don’t want to drive around them.
• FROG DECAPITATION
• “Take a bite, be a man!”
• Gorgeous lighter don’t work, just toss it on the ground
• That bad guy has an incredible facial scar
• Crotch punch, ouch
• Just go ahead and unload a pistol in an enclosed room, see if anyone’s eardrums rupture
• Slow-mo double pistol shootout — oh yeah, this is a Hong Kong action flick
• And the sideways roll while double pistol firing
• This movie REALLY likes this lady’s thighs
• Secret doors are cool
• Gratuitous… dream sequence?
• Keep saying “chill out”
• “I’ll swim!” he’s going to swim home?
• Don’t grab the assault rifle, just the knife. Good call.
• Steam torture
• It always comes down to the barrel tossing, doesn’t it?
• Arm in the gears, that couldn’t feel good