In The Last Mercenary, a gadget called the Big Mac can stop a man’s heart. It fries the electrical signal in his pacemaker. That is how Fernand, the agent who has spent years looking after Archibald Al Mahmoud, dies at home with government agents at the door. It is a ridiculous way to dispose of a character, and the film plays it straight enough to be funny. David Charhon’s action comedy runs on this kind of nonsense, and whether you stay with it depends on how much of it you can swallow.

Jean-Claude Van Damme plays Richard Brumére, a legendary secret service agent who has been in hiding. He comes back to France because the son he has never met is in trouble. Archibald (Samir Decazza) grew up believing Fernand was his father. Then Minister Sivardière, played by Valérie Kaprisky, cuts off the money that had quietly paid for his upbringing, and his immunity goes with it. Agents come for him, he is labelled a suspect in arms and drug trafficking, and he is arrested and questioned until he passes out. Richard breaks him out after a long brawl with the agents. He goes by the name George and does not tell Archibald who he is.

Charhon wrote the script with Ismael Sy Savane, and it is crowded. There is a fake bank employee, a lapsed immunity, an alias, a rescue, a minister who is kidnapped and goes along with it willingly, and an old operation called Cup-and-Ball that Commandant Jouard (Patrick Timsit) has not forgotten. Jouard is also the friend whose ex-wife turns out to be Archibald’s mother, so the family tangle doubles as a plot device. Keeping track of who owes what to whom takes some effort. The film moves fast enough that you rarely stop to ask, but a few turns feel arranged for the convenience of the next set piece.

Van Damme is the reason to watch, and the film knows it. He still has a physical presence that needs no help from the dialogue. The script lets him be the action hero and the butt of the joke at once: a man with a mythic past who is clumsy at the one thing he has never done, being somebody’s father. When it works, the laughs come from that gap and not from the punches. I would not call it a great performance. It is a generous one, though, and he is plainly in on the joke.

Around him, Alban Ivanov plays Alexandre Lazare and Assa Sylla plays Dalila. Éric Judor appears as Paul Lesueur, Miou-Miou as Marguerite, Djimo Salim as Momo and Nassim Lyes as Simyon Novak. The French cast gives the banter and bickering a local rhythm that sets the film apart from a standard Van Damme vehicle. The ensemble is large, though. With this many names, I suspect some of them get less to do than their billing promises, and you can feel the script reaching for them mostly when it needs a laugh.

The father-and-son story is the emotional centre, and the film clearly wants it to count. Archibald feels betrayed when Richard is exposed. Richard remembers his wife twirling a pendant around her finger. Archibald realizes that Richard was the man who comforted him at a funeral, and that he was never really abandoned. The scene is sincere, and it nearly lands. What gets in the way is the film around it. A joke or a chase tends to arrive just as a feeling is taking shape, and the feeling is cut off before it can settle. Richard’s closing promise to be there for his son would hit harder if the two of them had been given more quiet time earlier, instead of one long escape.

Tone is where the film stumbles most. At its best, the violence and the comedy feed each other, as in the Big Mac gag that opens the story and then returns near the end, when Richard triggers the device to kill the power in a building and slip away. One object serves both the macabre joke and the getaway, and the film gets real mileage out of it. At its worst, the two modes trip over each other: a gag lands badly beside a death, or a brawl halts the story cold. The action is brisk. The character scenes feel hurried.

The film reached Netflix on 30 July 2021, and critics were divided. Rotten Tomatoes lists 58% of 26 reviews as positive, with an average of 5.3 out of 10, and Metacritic gives it 48 out of 100 from nine critics. That is a mixed verdict, and I understand it: the film is easy to like in scenes and harder to admire as a whole.

I came away with more goodwill than I expected. The plot is a mess, the tone wobbles, and the emotional payoff is rushed. But there is real fun in the Big Mac, in a legend forced to play dad, and in a cast that seems to be enjoying itself. If you already like Van Damme, you will forgive most of it. If you do not, nothing here will change your mind.