Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

A hilarious homage to 80s/90s action flicks? ("We'd better attack one at a time so we don't run into each other," "Here's your weapon, Mr. Van Damme"//"I already have one" (shows his foot).) An indictment of the idiosyncrasies of modern culture? ("N-Word Jim" in the modern action remake of Tom &Huck. A ramen restaurant called "DRI" that serves ramen noodles without adding the water). Who knows what this show is and who cares? It was HILARIOUS AND FUN. To today's hipster culture, old action flicks are something to sit around goofing about. To the late 30s+ crowd, it's something we reminisce about. Just for the record, even back then, we didn't take JCVD all that seriously. He didn't have the cachet that came with the (now we know to be made up) mysterious past of Steven Seagal. Nor did he have the badassery of a Ahnold. But Bloodsport hit the scene long before MMA was a real, commercial thing and it was the closest we had to a peek behind closed Asian doors where Sumo battled capoeira and Kung Fu battled Ninjustu. It was a little gay (yes, I'm allowed to use that word in the vernacular sense, I am "grandfathered in" by having been born in the 70s) like the, "he made him say 'matei'," scene or the "I love you man...I love YOU," scenes at the end. but we looked past that and enjoyed the film and enjoyed JCVD for bringing the serious and slightly goofy to the big screen. He does the same now for the small screen. Just as "Batman Begins" imagined what and how The Dark Knight would be, act, and exist in the "real world", this series SERIOUSLY (I think) imagines JCVD as a former Black Ops dude whose films were merely a front that helped him get into hot zones around the world (MIAs in Vietnam? Let's film a war movie there. Sex slaves in Czechoslovakia? Let's film a futuristic blockbuster in the abandoned slums." So that's the premise...with JCVD coming out of retirement to get back into saving the world with the necessity of having to film some silly movie as a subplot. The "background movie" in this episode is Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn...with muscles, weapons, and a hilariously named, musclebound "N-Word Jim" (an awesome poke at today's culture that sits around with nothing better to do than blog against today's imagined affronteries and when that fails, they dig into the past to censor School Names, Sports Mascots and (SMH) books). I don't know if the jabs at the "movie" are funnier, or the jabs at the modern-day film crew working on it. The director puffs away on his vape-o-thingee while lecturing JCVD on why 90s-style action won't work. And the hairstylist/analyst trained at Paul Mitchell...and as a child soldier in some South American war. Best thing here is the acting...seriously. No one is overacting. Just as Christopher Nolan's Batman had a very serious tone that was present in Tim Burton's interpretation but absent in the ones inbetween, there is no "camp" here. The actors are playing real "actors" whose acting is just a front for their world-saving Special Operations. JCVD comes across as extremely serious and you can feel his boredom come through the screen when he sits in his mansion in his "JCVD"-embroidered towel and slippers after having performed his morning toilette using his "JCVD"-branded toiletries. He's rich and has hot women walking around naked whom he can't remember whether he has banged before but...there's something missing. And thank God (and JCVD) that he brought it back to us.