Year: 1996
Runtime: 100 min
Director: Ringo Lam
Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Natasha Henstridge, Zach Grenier, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Paul Ben-Victor.
The tagline for Maximum Risk is The Other Side of Safe, but this is funny. This is funny because this is actually one of the safest movies, creatively speaking, that I could imagine. See, it’s irony! Get it? Oh you will. And then you’ll laugh. Because it’s funny, dammit.
Too bad it’s the funniest bit related to the movie. This Jean-Claude Van Damme action flick could have desperately used a one liner or two.
Directed by Ringo Lam in his American debut, you can imagine studio executives hoping for the same success that John Woo mustered up when he made Van Damme the Hard Target. The difference however, is in how Woo embraced the more extreme nature of his directorial style, taking his already stylized blood operas and cranking the crazy up to eleven, whereas Lam remains far more grounded.
The plot starts off with a bang, introducing Van Damme in spectacular fashion as he runs through the streets of Nice, chased by two dudes in suits. He jumps out of windows, gets trapped in narrow alleys, and finally steals a fruit peddler’s cart in a last ditch gamble to escape, crashing to his death in a tangle of traffic. Yes, I said death. Because as anyone who is familiar with Van Damme’s cinematic output is aware (or really anyone who read a description of the movie) he always has a twin brother.
This twin happens to be a French cop and he is intrigued about the dead man with his face. He discovers the deceased to be the brother he never knew he had and travels to America to learn more about him. Of course, there are downsides to wearing your dead brother’s face, particularly when it turns out said brother was adopted by a Russian family and joined the Russian mafia.
Soon every Russian mobster in New York wants him dead, his brother’s girlfriend wants to jump his bones, and this French cop is just wandering around wondering aloud what kind of man his brother was and occasionally kicking dudes in the face.
There are bad Russian mobsters, honorable Russian mobsters, a group of corrupt FBI agents, and a secret list that Van Damme’s brother had hidden away in Nice that could spell big trouble for all of them. It’s like a cross between a Euro-spy adventure and a film noir, but it never really commits to either genre, instead giving us a lot of Van Damme trying to act introspective mixed with a little bit of action.
And the action never really heats up. Sure, there are a few martial arts scenes, but aside from one fight in a Russian sauna (which fills the typical quota for homoeroticism in a Van Damme movie) and a decent little dust up in a burning building, the hand-to-hand scenes lack energy and would feel at home in a Steven Seagal picture. There’s also a set piece at the very end in a meat packing warehouse that looks pretty cool, but it’s too little too late to save the movie for action buffs.
So we get a lot of drama scenes to chew on as Van Damme tries to give us something worthy of Shakespeare. He doesn’t quite get there, but he manages to look good in a variety of suits and fancy jackets, and his partner in all this soul searching, Natasha Henstridge, does a very good job. She manages to be sexy but also instills her character with a bit more depth than you would expect from the token love interest, though she never has as much motive for her involvement in this dangerous affair. At least she can act, although the writing betrays her by turning her into a typical damsel in distress before the end.
Speaking of writing, oof! Penned by Larry Ferguson, the screenwriter behind movies like Highlander, and, um, er, Beverly Hills Cop 2, Alien 3, and the 2002 Rollerball, the writing wants us to believe it is mature stuff but the dialog is corny and far too self-serious. It would have greatly benefited from a joke or two to break up the maudlin atmosphere. It’s a gray movie with a gray attitude, and that might fit for Lam’s previous work but those were more personal films. With Jean-Claude Van Damme the concept of the brooding hero alone against a corrupt system is less effective than if a more versatile actor had taken the role. He’s not exactly Chow Yun Fat.
It’s a restrained piece of action fare that doesn’t really step out and try anything new. Lam directs it without any particular urgency and even a scene that should leave us on the edge of our seats, like Van Damme jumping between speeding subway cars, has all the intensity of a rent-a-car commercial. There are a few nice touches with the story itself, particularly in the twisty way the FBI involves themselves in the shenanigans, but all of the clever plot beats are thrown out the window for the finale, which just decides to straight up kidnap everyone they can think of to emotionally blackmail our hero and conveniently bring all the bad guys into one geographic location so we can wrap this up nicely in Nice.
For the most part, the plot is surprisingly tight. Or at least focused, with no unnecessary side dalliances. Unfortunately, there are a few gaping holes, one of the most egregious being an encounter very early in the film when Van Damme goes to see the lawyer who facilitated his brother’s adoption. Naturally, when he arrives the office is on fire and the lawyer rather dead, killed by a hulking Russian brute who looks a bit like an off-brand Ivan Drago. All well and good, except the Russians aren’t supposed to know about the twin brother—the subject of mistaken identity is the main plot, for crying out loud! It’s right on the back of the box description and is the movie’s only selling point unless you get a boner seeing either Natasha Henstridge or Jean-Claude Van Damme without a shirt (we all do, admit it).
Maximum Risk feels like Van Damme trying to move into a new era, but the 90s didn’t know what they wanted with their action heroes and he is hopeless miscast in this web of urban intrigue. The movie isn’t bad, it just lacks the more outlandish qualities we’ve come to love from the Muscles from Brussels and doesn’t benefit from any of Lam’s edgy social undertones. It definitely has its moments and any fan of Van Damme will enjoy themselves, but they’ll likely find themselves pining for the glory days of Van Damme and his twin brother, as seen in classics like Double Impact.
