Acclaimed action performer Jean-Claude Van Damme has played a twin or dual roles in movies like Double Impact, Maximum Risk, and Replicant. Not every movie has Jean-Claude Van Damme playing a twin, but maybe every movie should. The acclaimed martial artist and actor has starred in over 70 films (and counting) at this point in his career. Van Damme is well-known for his work in action films especially, including Cyborg, Kickboxer, and Timecop. In more recent years, he’s appeared in The Expendables 2 and the Kung Fu Panda franchise.
Van Damme has actually played more roles than the number of movies he’s performed in, thanks to three dual-role action films starring the balletic martial artist as a twin—including a direct-to-DVD sci-fi release featuring Van Damme as a clone. That’s three movies and six Van Dammes, a great bargain for JCVD fans.
In chronological order, the first of the three is Sheldon Lettich’s Double Impact (1991), a Hong Kong-set action film written and produced by Van Damme. Playing both Alex and Chad Wagner, twins raised apart in Hong Kong and Paris, Van Damme leveraged the contrasting natures of Alex (violent) and Chad (not-so-violent) to prove himself as an actor capable of more than just action moves. Inspired by Alexandre Dumas’ 1844 novella The Corsican Brothers, a story similarly about twins separated at birth, Double Impact pulled off the dual-role concept successfully enough for it to become a minor staple of Van Damme’s mid-’90s/early 2000s career.
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Five years after the success of Double Impact, Ringo Lam’s poorly reviewed, yet underrated, Maximum Risk (1996) took the Double Damme approach again in what would be Lam and Van Damme’s first of three movies working together—Replicant (2001) and In hell (2003) being the second and third. Whereas Double Impact has Van Damme fighting side-by-side as twin versions of himself, Maximum Risk follows a revenge-redemption plot, opening with the death of Alain Moreau’s brother Mikhail Suverov—twins both played by Van Damme. In typical Van Damme fashion, Maximum Risk is pure action with only sprinkles of dialogue, as Van Damme brutally investigates his brother’s murder.
Lam and Van Damme linked up again for the sci-fi direct-to-DVD action flick Replicant (2001), which, typical of sci-fi, takes a more thought-provoking approach to the “twin” concept. Playing twins-by-birth in Double Impact and Maximum Risk, Replicant instead shows Van Damme as a serial killer who is cloned by the Feds with the intent of using the clone to track down the killer. Here, audiences see Van Damme playing both hero and villain in a sort of cat-and-mouse chase. Even though the intelligent concept overpromised on the film’s overall delivery, Replicant proved that Van Damme remains an action star.
Now, with Van Damme entering his ’60s, speculation on whether he will finally do the much-desired “Triple Impact” sequel to Double Impact has been brewing again. Though unlikely, the thought of another dual-role Double Damme special is undeniably appealing. This would be even more so the case if, as the speculative title suggests, the “Triple Impact” project ups the stakes by throwing a third Jean-Claude Van Damme into the mix.