Poor Tsui Hark. I can only imagine the conversation with the big Hollywood producer:

"Tsui, baby, we love you, we love your work. We love you so much that your first American feature will star one of the world's most renowned action stars. It's gonna co-star one of the most recognizable figures in America and the villain is an award winning actor with major cult status."

"So what's the catch?"

"Well the star has been hopped up on goofballs for the past four years, the costar is a basketball player more known for getting in fights and missing practices then for his playing ability, and the the villain is, umm, well, Mickey Rourke."

Welcome to America, Tsui.

So, basically the esteemed Mr. Hark had a large plate load of crap dumped directly into his lap and was asked to do something interesting with it. The amazing thing thing is that he, to some extent, succeeded, because Double Team, while, completely ludicrous, horribly acted, and sickeningly derivative, is at times incredibly fun to watch. Sure there are speeches that contradict themselves in sequential lines. Fine, there is absolutely no reason why Quinn (action import/importer Jean Claude Van Damme) is fighting any particular person at any given time. Ok, yeah, Dennis Rodman's haircut and color change without warning or regard to continuity. And yes, there are "cyber-monks".

The plot is, of course, a loose excuse from which to hang various fight scenes and the obligatory Van Damme training montage (this one could be titled "How to recover from a debilitating injury in under three months using stuff you can find in your bedroom"). Van Damme, a CIA anti-terrorist man, is brought back from Paris for the obligatory "one last mission," which he--obligatorily--screws up royally, in the process killing the son of bad man Stavros (Rourke, who looks like the studio has put him through a regimen of heavy lifting and Vitamin-S if you know what I mean). (Just as a side note--why is it that the good guys, the most highly trained folks in the world, always manage botch the mission? Why is it, in movies, that our tax dollars are going to pay for hard core killing machines that invariably screw up? Come on people.) Anyway, Van Damme wakes up on a remote island filled with ex-spooks who now serve as freelance analysts of terrorist activity that, in the grand spirit of plagiarism and knock-off, is basically the island from the television show The Prisoner. Anyway Rourke has got Van Damme's wife and she's pregnant so he escapes blah blah blah.

In terms of acting, Van Damme is about his standard level. Rourke kinda slums and slurs around his four or five lines of dialogue. And as an actor, Rodman is really tall and has a lot of piercings. It was said that the greek orator Demosthenes learned articulation by walking around with small pebbles in his mouth; Rodman forgot to take them out before the camera started rolling.

The only real high points of the movie are the fight scenes which are ridiculous and completely over the top. In fact, the willingness of the film to go over the top and into the absurd is its only real saving grace. You get an underwater fight (with plastic bags and lasers), a chaotic gunfight involving every spy organization in the world, an exploding baby doll, a spectacularly choreographed kung fu match up between Van Damme and some guy who holds a knife in his toes (Xin Xin Xiong, a veteran of several of Hark's movies) and, of course, the final showdown which is probably the best coliseum/land mine/tiger/motorcycle/baby basket/gunfight/exploding coke machine free-for-all ever captured on film.

So, basically, it's not Van Damme's best effort; it's not Tsui Hark's best effort; it's not Mickey Rourke's best effort; and, unfortunately, it's not Rodman's last effort. But it's hard to hate Double Team unequivocally because it's so silly and over the top. Furthermore, like the Van Damme vehicles Maximum Risk and Hard Target it brought another Hong Kong giant to the shores of this country, and maybe, like John Woo and Ringo Lam, Tsui can begin to move into his own here.