Stamped Overdue (1994)

D. Robert Harmon
Colour


Just as Steven Seagal once furthered his action hero career by posing as a chef, and Arnold Schwarzenegger became a cop at a kindergarten, here Jean Claude Van Damme takes on a seemingly normal sounding job and brings added explosions and gunfire to it. For the small town library in the New England hamlet of Shakespeare has itself a new librarian, but this is no fusty middle aged spinster, it’s the mussels from the Brussels himself. He is Jacques Duvall, bibliophile, qualified librarian and French Foreign Legion commando. (I’m not exactly sure if commando is a rank one can attain in the Foreign Legion, or why this man – who is otherwise portrayed as French – was allowed to join the French Foreign Legion in the first place. But, please, this film really doesn’t invite too many questions.)  Coincidentally, a legendary and incredibly valuable diamond is being displayed at the museum attached to this library, and villainous James Woods and his gang of criminals are set to steal it. The stage is set for car chases, automatic gun fire and explosions in this sleepy, leafy little New England town. As the one thing this gang hasn’t counted on is the librarian.


Few films have such commitment to being mindless, adrenalin soaked fun as ‘Stamped Overdue’. It’s almost as if the writers (six of whom, incredibly, are credited), worked out a whole list of elements which JUST HAD to be in their action movie/library combo. Will the hero have a gunfight in the middle of the library, gunfire shooting books from the shelves so that they explode in charred sheets of paper? Of course he will. When the hero runs out of bullets, will he use a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to beat a foe into submission before making a tired semi-literary quip? Without a doubt. Will the hero be able to save himself by pulling the bookshelves on top of him and letting the books absorb the gunfire? Yes, because resourceful is his middle name (and books seemingly only disintegrate under gunfire when he needs them to). Will the bad guy make some sneering remark about those who like books being wimps? Absolutely. And will the young librarian assistant, so tightly wound and frigid in her bun, finally relent to the hero’s charms to undo her hair and reveal what a gorgeous face and hot bod she has? Please, this isn’t just an action movie, it is poetry!


Of course this is all magnificently stupid stuff. You truly have to admire the filmmakers’ commitment to being so absolutely, fantastically, moronically stupid. They set out to make a big, dumb film and succeeded in making a film so lacking in IQ that even that year (the year of ‘The Specialist’ and Van Damme’s own ‘Streetfighter’), it was the idiot child sat in the corner trying to suck its own thumb but somehow failing. But my problem with this big, brash film where the hero is a bibliophile librarian and the villain professes to hate reading, is that a lot of books do suffer. As a bookish man myself, it distresses me to see all those broken spines and flying leaves. By the end, when half the library is on fire, all this destruction just seems like a hell of a shame and one which doesn’t merit the big heroic flourish in the music. As for all the lead character’s stated love of books, the message of this film seems to be: books are good, but martial arts and blowing things up are way cooler – especially when the things you’re blowing up burn as easily as books. And surely that’s not the message a film set in a library should send.