The damn question never goes away, forever bounding back after you’ve hurled it away with a bolt of indifference, pressing its pug features directly into the sternum of your preoccupation, demanding an answer, yet fully aware that the inherent ambiguity buttressing its riddle will fail to be silenced by a sentence of simplified stream of consciousness. What is this rampaging query, this subject of so much scorn and confusion? It’s none other than the dissonant rhymes of: what is art?

The bastard beast saddles up to the platform of the intellect, pure embodiment of migraines everywhere, all set to be loaded up with vapid croaks of misinformed generalisation.

“What?” says a young fellow atop a stone bollard, perusing the pages of the Daily Star with a stealthy finger, “well, surely to fuck, art is less a material object than the affect engendered in the mind of an individual beholding a certain object, an affect of such specificity that we attribute to it labels of grandeur that are subsequently projected externally onto the object in question.” And with that he wearily turned round, tucking his face once again into the bowels of his newspaper and coughing up a solid wedge of sputum.

But what the name of Jeff Fahey’s delayed fame is this enigmatic affect? More to the point, is it in fact Jean Claude Van Damme? This is the very question interrogated by the film Until Death. Yet this cinematic specimen stops short at dishing out the most adjective-laden of elucidations, identifying the site for an exploration into the perils of art in two furry mounds that flank our fearless protagonist’s face, nodes of stunning neon certitude that achieve what was previously deemed impossible, the act of ameliorating the luminous figure of Van Damme. Never before would I have conjectured that such a phenomenal coalescence could be within the realm of feasibility, lashed with a rare potentiality that defies rationality. To be aware that much of the early gossip concerning Until Death expressed lively celebration at the supposed working title of Sideburns of Death is to cast the light of aptness upon the film; granted, this could only be a title locked up in the epiphanies of an early script draft, but it sums up proceedings with such efficacy as to warrant repeated citation.

These kernels of sideburn wisdom will be returned to in due course. Meanwhile, let us ask: what odyssey does the name of Jean Claude Van Damme grace this time?

In Until Death the Belgian sprite plays Anthony Stowe, a hardened cop incarcerated in a routine of heroin rushes and altercations with those on both sides of the law. This man, leather jacket welded to his frame, enjoys nothing more than to piss off his colleagues, attracting a surfeit of dirty looks each and every time he wanders round the office, a perpetual grimace snug over his battered face. Polarised by an innate intent that says, “Get that bad deviant you’ve been after for an age,” and another instinctual urge that whispers, “There may be an old buddy of yours down in forensics that requires a good dose of career wrecking,” Stowe’s multidirectional disdain has no reason to be anxious of depletion, seems that there’s oodles to go about. He even finds time to sweet-talk his wife with such heartfelt maxims as: “what the fuck do you want?”