I've heard director Tsui Hark called the Steven Spielberg of Hong Kong. If he makes another film like this one it won't be too long before he's better known as the King of Loserville.

Usually when a film is this bad, a whistleblower -- a filmmaker or actor who realizes what a piled-high piece of crap he or she is making -- leaks the whole fiasco to the tabloids. Failing that, the actors just generally look haggard and bored. Unfortunately, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman are such bad actors that they couldn't look haggard and bored if they were trapped in a closet with Stanislavski for twelve hours.

As if Rodman in a starring role weren't unappetizing enough, the filmmakers add a heapin' helpin' of basketball jokes, bad writers' secret code for "we're too stupid to produce real dialogue." The "plot" involves underwater lasers that surround the island where Jean-Claude gets stuck. Apparently lasers are now smart enough to know the difference between human matter and liquid matter and destroy one kind but not the other. If you watch real closely, you can also catch those same lasers looking haggard and bored.

Compounding my disappointment was the fact that the finale of the film didn't consist of Rodman cornering the bad guys and stomping their testicles to jelly. Instead, a tiger runs around a burning coliseum eating people while Dennis, Jean-Claude and the son he's trying to save take cover behind a Coke machine (the soft drink apparently preferred by basketball players whose new nickname on the court is "nutsy"). If only the two had been turned into actor biscuits, "Double Team" might have at least been known as the film that killed two acting scourges with one stone.