By the time Double Impact was released in early August of 1991, Jean-Claude Van Damme was a certified star in the action genre, having headlined five movies in less than three years following his breakout role in Bloodsport (1988). Before he became a movie star, he was known—if he was known at all—entirely within martial arts circles, having achieved fame in his native Brussels for his karate and kickboxing career, from which he retired in 1982 to pursue acting in Hollywood. After four years of virtually nothing, he landed a major role in No Retreat, No Surrender (1986), in which he played a villainous Soviet martial artist pitted against an American teenager (think a much lower budgeted, martial arts version of Rocky IV). Then came Bloodsport, which was followed by a veritable wave of quickly produced JCVD action flicks—Black Eagle (1988), Cyborg (1989), Kickboxer (1989), Lionheart (1990), Death Warrant (1990)—almost all of which were advertised with an interchangeable image of the muscular Van Damme, his face stern and purposed, posed with flexed arms and clenched fists, the very portrait of humorless action violence.

Give Van Damme credit: He recognized at this point that he couldn’t go on playing the same steely martial-arts roles forever, especially if he wanted to break into the action stratosphere dominated at that time by Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger (and, to a lesser extent, Steven Seagal and Chuck Norris). Which is precisely why a movie like Double Impact was so appealing: Not only did it focus more on international action and intrigue, but it promised a bigger budget and two distinct roles for Van Damme, which would allow him to showcase more of his acting ability (and yes, he can act when given the right material).

Van Damme plays twins Alex and Chad Wagner who are separated as infants when their parents are gunned down in Hong Kong in the late 1960s by a ruthless land developer named Nigel Griffith (Alan Scarfe), who double-crosses them over the construction of a tunnel. One of the twins, Chad, is saved by his parents’ American bodyguard, Frank Avery (Geoffrey Lewis), who brings him back to Los Angeles and raises him as own son. You’ll be shocked to know that Chad becomes a martial artist who runs his own dojo in L.A., where his clientele appears to consist almost exclusively of attractive young women. The other twin, Alex, is taken away by a Chinese nurse, and he is raised on the mean streets of Hong Kong, where he becomes a cynical, cigar-chomping smuggler.

The twins are brought together in Hong Kong 25 years later at Frank’s behest, as he still wants to take down Griffith and the Triad gang backing him and get the money owed to Alex and Chad. Being polar opposites—Chad is a Southern California preppy, while Alex is dark and brooding—the reunited twins don’t exactly get along, especially because Alex is hyper-jealous of his girlfriend, Danielle (Alonna Shaw), who happens to work for Griffith and is enlisted by the twins to spy for them. Frank and the twins operate out of an abandoned resort hotel on an island just off the coast of Hong Kong, but it isn’t long before Griffth and his Triad goons discover their whereabouts and what they are up to.

Plenty of fisticuffs and gun mayhem ensues, some of which takes advantage of Van Damme’s martial arts prowess (lots of slow-motion roundhouse kicks, to be sure) and other of which pushes him into slightly different territory. He shares the screen with himself a lot, and even when the twins are separated, we are usually cutting back and forth between their parallel lines of action, ensuring that the promise of “Double Van Damme” is fulfilled. He meets the challenge of playing two distinctly different roles, although both are slightly cartoonish in their own way, exemplified most clearly with their competing hair styles: Chad’s smooth shave and blow-dried coiffure contrasts with Alex’s two-day stubble and slicked back hair-helmet. Van Damme clearly enjoyed the competing roles, and watching him glower and chomp on a cigar as Alex makes one wish he had been cast as the villain more frequently.

Co-writer/director Sheldon Lettich, who had previously directed Van Damme in Lionheart (1990) and co-wrote Bloodsport, does a meat-and-potatoes job of helming the action, delivering more or less exactly what you would expect. He injects some humor into the proceedings, but also allows the story to go darker when it needs to. When he veers into less familiar territory, particularly a steamy soft-core love scene between Chad and Danielle that takes place entirely within Alex’s drunken-jealous mind, the film just feels awkward. But, when he is pitting Van Damme against his Bloodsport nemesis Bolo Yeung playing a scarred Triad assassin, it all feels right.

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