Van Damme’s Popularity Is Rising… Slowly

We gotta appreciate that Jean Claude Van Damme is not a young man anymore and that he burned a lot of (big, very big) bridges in the 1990s.  He’ll never be up there at that level again, for example, with the likes of The Rock.  But right now things could be worse.  There was a time when JCVD’s next movie was guaranteed to be a waste of time, a dull and depressing DTV with a sour-faced Van Damme phoning it in.  While his next movie is going DTV, things are looking up.

After Dark Action told ManlyMovie.net a few months ago that Enemies Closer would come early 2014 and wasn’t ‘a guaranteed DTV’.  That turned out to be sort of true, they were right about their date (it’ll be released Jan 24th), as for the release, it’s still DTV/VOD but will get a limited theatrical run.  So it may come to a big screen near you.  That’s probably because Enemies Closer is probably going to be a good movie but an unsafe bet, if you catch our drift.  It’s directed by Sudden Death and  TimeCop director Peter Hyams.  Here’s that cool trailer again:

Then there’s ‘Swelter’ (2014), another low-key movie that genuinely looks that it’ll probably be ‘not bad’ at least, and ‘good’ at best.  It’ll be Van Damme’s first movie shot in L.A. since the 1990s.  It seems that movie is generating some interest, after a screening at the AFM earlier this month, it appears to be selling out around the world in distribution deals, with North America being the final region being negotiated.  That’s good news, JCVD may not be as big as he once was, but these are the right movies to appear in. 

Did we also mention that the ‘Epic Split’ Volvo ad has gone nuclear?  48 million views as of this article, in ten days.  It has gone truly viral, I’ve seen a lot of ‘I remember that guy!’ across the ‘net this past week.  So… should JCVD keep doing what he’s doing, pulling small hit after small hit?  Can’t be a bad thing…