Double Impact (1991)

Double Impact arrives from 1991, a year in which the cultural flashpoints of a later decade had not yet been assembled. Jean-Claude Van Damme plays twins, Chad and Alex, separated in infancy when Triad gunmen murder their parents outside the Victoria Harbour Tunnel. One is raised in Paris by a family retainer, the other in a Hong Kong orphanage, and both grow into the same jawline. The film's interests are narrow and honestly declared: gunfire, karate, smuggled Mercedes, a forklift used as a murder weapon. Nothing here is arranged to instruct us. The Hong Kong setting supplies texture and villains, not commentary, and the Asian cast members go about their criminal business without a single line of thematic freight attached.

The women fare as the genre demands. Danielle works in the villain's office, snoops through his files, gets captured, and is rescued. Kara, played by a bodybuilder with visible deltoids, exists to be menacing and then to be defeated. The film regards neither of them as a case study. There is a scene in which Kara molests Danielle, handled with the shrug of a plot mechanic, and no reckoning follows. A love scene between Van Damme and Alonna Shaw is rendered in soft lens and paranoid fantasy, which the New York Times noted at the time with some fatigue.

The rest is a revenge picture with two of everything and a story that critics found minimal. Ebert gave it two stars and compared its production values to a lesser Bond entry. The film's ambitions are aerodynamic. It wants to move, and it moves, and it ends with a container dropped on a man. There is no sermon in it. There is barely a message. It is a 1991 action vehicle, and it behaves like one, and there is a certain integrity in that, however little it advances the conversation.