Maximum Risk (1996)

For his US directorial debut, top HK film-maker Ringo Lam follows in the footsteps of fellow countryman John Woo by working with Belgian martial arts star Jean Claude Van Damme. A typically preposterous 90s Hollywood actioner, Lam's Maximum Risk adequately showcases the director's not inconsiderable talent when it comes to breath-taking stunts and brutal violence and certainly puts Van Damme through his paces, but the film is hampered by an overly complex plot and talkative script that tends to get in the way of the fun.Still, it's definitely worth persevering with the film's weaker parts (even the pointless sub-plot about a crazy wannabe novelist/taxi-driver) just to get to the good bits, which include several well choreographed punch-ups between the star and a muscle-bound Russian goon, a great scene that sees Van Damme narrowly avoiding a speeding train, a few decent car chases, Jean Claude versus a chainsaw wielding baddie, and the gorgeous Natasha Henstridge getting her top off for a spot of hanky panky.

Now i thought Steven Seagal had the best fight scenes in his movies but Jean Claude is way better!!!!.This movie is very solid and entertaining and in my opinion Jean Claude's best movie. The fight scenes are very well done and the brutal bone snapping fights show what Van Damme can really do in a situation with stupid french punks. Maximum Risk is a very underrated movie like The Last Boyscout and deserves way more credit that what it gets nowadays and the fight in the elevator at the end when Van Damme kills the Russian guy by lodging a knife in his boot was ingenious and suspenseful. Overall Maximum Risk is a very entertaining action movie with great fights and i recommend you get the blu ray!!

**SPOILERS** It's when Niece France policeman Alain Moreau, Jean Claude Van-Damme, was summoned to the city morgue to check out a stiff who was killed by going head-first through a moving car's windshield that he realized that he wasn't born alone in the world! His twin brother Mikhail Suverov, came into the world together, within the space of five minutes, with him!Going to see his mom, Stephane Avdran, a shocked Alain learned from her that his brother we given up at birth for adoption since she, being single and with no means of support, couldn't take care of him much less Alain. Determined to find out just what the mysterious Mikhail was doing all these years Alain, finding out that he lived in New York City, took over his identity in order to clear up that mystery! And what a mystery it was! Mikhail was a top member of the Russian Mob in Brighton Beach, or littler Oddesa as it's know, Brooklyn! It was Mikhail who was playing double-agent for the Russian Mob in getting the goods on members of the NYPD and FBI Agents who were secretly working for it!It doesn't take long for Alain, impersonating his brother Mikhail, to go into action having it out with top Russian Mob hit-man Red-Face, Stefanos Mitsakakis, sent by the Russian Mob, in mistaking him for his dead brother Mikhail, first in Niece then in Brooklyn and then back in Niece before he, with the help of a bowie knife, finally put him away for good. Alain also got to know his late brother's girlfriend Alex Minetti, Natasha Henstridge, who worked as a bar maid in a Brighton Beach Russian Mob run nightclub, the Bohemian, who then ended up falling in love with him. Even though Alain put her life in mortal danger by Alex just knowing him.There's also the two dirty FBI Agents Pellman & Loomis, Paul Bn-Victor & Frank Senger, who were responsible for Mikhail death back in Niece who together with the Russain Mob wanted Alain to get his hands on a secret little black book, together with audio tapes and photos, that was locked away in a Niece bank safe deposit box. The contents of that book can can implicated them in dealing with the mob and send the two , as well as dozens of other FBI Agents and NYPD policemen, up the river for the rest of their lives!**SPOILER** The big final in the movie after Alain had almost single handed wrecked half of Brighton Beach, together with the Russian mobsters who live there, takes place back in Niece France where the film first began. It's there where Alain finishes the job that he at first started there by putting an end to what was still left of the Russian Mob together with its partners in crime FBI Agents Pellman & Loomis. Alain achieved all that in a wild bank shoot out together with a number of multi car explosions as well as a climatic bone chilling battle, in a massive walk-in freezer, with a crazed and out of control Loomis, using a chainsaw, and profusely sweating, in spite of the freezing cold, Pellman at a Niece meat packing factory!

Maximum Risk was released in 1996, the year after Species was released and was, if I remember correctly, a huge hit. I was in high school at the time, and I know it was highly popular with my peers, who are clearly the same target audience that director Ringo Lam was shooting for with Maximum Risk. Van Damme lends his cult star power along with Natasha Henstridge (which the IMDb claims is sometimes credited as "The Chick From Species") under the direction of Hong Kong action director Lam and the result is a remarkably bad, by-the-numbers revenge drama.The movie opens with a routine high speed chase that is interesting only because it takes places through tiny alleys in the south of France and ends in a wild jump into oncoming traffic by the man being chased, who is played by Van Damme and who dies before we even see the title of the movie. The last movie that I watched before this one was Universal Soldier, another movie in which Van Damme's character is killing within the first few minutes of the movie, so I was surprised to see it happen again given that this is obviously a very different movie. But if nothing else, the opening chase definitely gets your attention, if only to make you wonder what would make him so desperate to escape from the men chasing him, who turned out to be government agents.But an early death is not the only familiar thing we'll see. Van Damme also plays a double role and spends most of the movie trying to avenge his brother, You see, it seems that there is a French cop who bears an astonishing resemblance to the man killed in the chase, and after some investigation it's revealed that he is a long lost brother. The mother tearfully admits that she had to give up her other son when he was an infant because she couldn't support two children, and never told her other son Alain (the French police officer) that he ever had a brother.That's basically the set-up, and Alain drops everything and sets off on a personal quest to find out who his brother was and who killed him and why. This is what leads him to Alex, his dead brother's girlfriend, played by Natasha Henstridge, who surely would never have taken such a ridiculous role had she not been brand new in the movies. This is her second film, and I am at a loss to explain why she would accept such a ludicrous role other than her inexperience in film.Alex is an ex-stripper who is now a waitress for questionable characters ("less money but more respectable"), who doesn't blink when Alain shows up at her work, other than to rush him out because he's not exactly welcome there. He tends to be stone silent when he approaches people who think that he is his brother, but in most cases ultimately he comes right out and tells them, and when he tells Alex, she joins him in his mission.Sadly, there is nothing interesting or original about the movie. Every character is a cliché, good guys or bad. All that's left is Alain's quest to learn about his brother's life and bring his killers to justice, which is honorable but all he can do is spout cheesy lines about how he's not going to rest until his brother's killers are brought to justice. I have said before that Van Damme gets a lot of bad press about his movies, and I think that because of that people often forget that his characters are almost always motivated by very honorable ideas and values. He delivers a good message in a way that very few other action stars do, and unfortunately in Maximum Risk the problem is that it's too obvious and there's not really anything else in the movie to entertain us along the way.James Berardinelli, for example, claims in his review that Van Damme's acting ability "can charitably be described as 'limited,'" so clearly there can be no satisfactory emotional content in the movie. He's right that Van Damme's acting is often wooden and unconvincing, but dead wrong that he can't do it. Sadly, it wasn't until eight years later, in Wake of Death (which Berardinelli didn't see) that Van Damme showed without question that he can definitely convey emotions. WOW.There is the issue that there is no chemistry whatsoever between Van Damme and Henstridge, but a more pressing concern is that she was a man's lover and then, after he was killed, she honored his memory by becoming his twin brother's lover. Is it just me or does something about that just not come off right? Sort of throws a wet towel over the already boring and routine obligatory ending.Unfortunately, Lam is not the first Hong Kong action director to enter the American market with a Van Damme disaster. John Woo, an occasionally lucky director, also came to America and brought us Hard Target, another of Van Damme's few thorough disappointments. Van Damme is a major action star with genuine talent and appeal, but sadly this movie was worth the time of effort of anyone involved