User reviews

Maximum Risk is the first US feature film from acclaimed Hong Kong director Ringo Lam with Van Damme as star. He previously brought in John Woo to direct action classic Hard Target, but JCVD and John Woo didn't exactly hit it off creatively. Ringo Lam and JCVD worked well together and would continue to work together on two more films(Replicant and In Hell). Maximum Risk is much different than the movies JCVD normally works on, it is pretty dark, gritty and has less stylish action that he is known for. The film is mostly devoid of humor and is presented in a serious and more realistic manner. Ringo Lam gets Van Damme to focus more on his acting and by the time he works with JCVD next, his acting improves significantly. While the whole twin brother plot has been done to death at this point, JCVD is a cop and must investigate the circumstances of his estranged twin brother's death. Natasha Henstridge is good in this as JCVD's love interest and damsel in distress. I would regard this as more of a thriller than straight up action movie, but as a mash up of genres it does it fairly well. This is also the 1st action movie I seen that involves the Russian mob, which nowadays is common with movies like John Wick, The Equalizer, etc. As a whole this was done well and JCVD would work next with legendary Hong Kong director/producer Tsui Hark on Knock Off which is unfortunate because that movie is a giant turkey of a movie, completely terrible. But that is another story...

This has to be the best Jean-Claude Van Damme action movie he has made. It has it all, and it has it in spades. This movie is 100 minutes, and 95 of those are pure action.

You have great car chases through the streets of Nice and New York.

You have a whole lot of people the Government is not going to have to arrest and try because they will not be around.

You have three, count them three outstanding fights between Jean-Claude Van Damme and the biggest, baddest dude you can imagine.

And, you have Natasha Henstridge in the bathroom making love and giving us a view we will long remember.

What more can you ask for?

As a Van Damme fan when i saw this film i was instantly blown away.The only thing i didn't like was the brother storyline again.How many brothers has this guy got.But seriously this is an action movie from start to finish.There is car chases, fights, and of course a beautiful woman.What more could you ask for?.Well nothing really,this movie has it all and to think it was from the start of Van Damme's drug taking days.He must have been on drugs to make Double Team which is'nt bad film ,just bad actors (Dennis Rodman).Any way Maximum Risk is a movie that will have you on the edge of your seat from start to finish.The fight scenes are great and well directed.And it has Natasha Henstridge who acts well and puts on a decent performance.She is also easy on the eye in more ways than one.

I guess 'Maximum Risk' kind of marks Van Damme's 'turning point' from 'A-list action star' to 'straight-to-video' action star. Prior to 'Maximum Risk,' most of his films were primarily released theatrically, however, due to lackluster Box Office returns in the U.S. this one quickly went to the small screen... and so did many of his subsequent ones.

Jean Claude Van Damme plays a cop in France who finds out he had an identical twin brother who he had been separated at birth ('Double Team' anyone?), but now died during an attempt to reunite the family. Now, he must travel to America to track down what happened to his long lost bro.

Yeah, it's an 'action' film, but there's probably not enough action to really stick in your mind. Sure, there are all the usual car chases and fights, but the decision to make Van Damme an ex army sniper means he's primarily skilled with guns rather than his trademark fists. Not only does this mean that he doesn't do as much martial arts as you might expect, but also he tends to use a pistol (and, unless it's just me, but don't army snipers use high-powered rifles?).

Natasha Henstridge plays the 'love interest' and she's in it basically to fall in love with JCVD. Her character gets about as much development as the bad guys, who are pretty much totally forgettable. Some of them are Russians and, just to add extra clichés, they contain a 'Yuri' (are there any Russian men who aren't called 'Yuri' or 'Dimitri?').

I know Van Damme's character hasn't had his mind wiped, but the script plays out like a modern day version of 'Total Recall' (or is it just me?). Either way, it's not half as much fun as Arnie's sci-fi epic. It's a kind of 'filler' film in Van Damme's catalogue. There's actually nothing I can say that's really bad about it, it's just not that memorable and certainly not half as much of a guilty pleasure as many of his earlier outings.

As this film opens a man is chased through the city of Nice; just as it looks as if he has escaped his pursuers he has an accident and is killed. We are then introduced to our protagonist, Alain Moreau, who looks identical to the dead man. Alain is a French policeman who was unaware that he had an identical twin who was adopted when he was still a baby. He determines to solve his brother's murder. This investigation will take him to New York where he will end up confronting the Russian Mafia, in which his brother was involved.

I really enjoyed this film; it is full of impressive action as well as a few twists. The first twist comes surprisingly early on with the death of Alain's brother... the opening chase feels as though it showing us the man destined to be the protagonist not somebody who is about to die. Having a protagonist who is a twin of the character might feel a bit cliché but it works to give him motivation and lead to others not realising they are facing Alain rather than his twin. There is a lot of impressive action; this is nicely varied with shooting, martial arts, vehicle chases and the occasional explosion. The acting is pretty good; Van Damme is on really good form as Alain, and twin Mikhail, and Natasha Henstridge is good as Mikhail's girlfriend; the rest of the cast are solid even though many are just there to be beaten up by Van Damme! Overall I wouldn't say this is a classic but I'd definitely recommend it to action fans.

Maximum Risk is the second Van Damme-movie to be directed by a HongKong-director(the first was "Hard Target" by John Woo), Ringo Lam delivers stylish action as always, but this isn`t the same as "Full Contact", but this is very good after American standards. Van Damme delivers his usual stuff. Maximum Risk is great! 9/10

This Van Damme vehicle is plotty, yet the plot is mostly uninteresting, and ultimately cliched. The car chases are spectacular but repetitive, and that repetition quickly grows tiresome. Fight sequences are mostly impressive, but when Van Damme faced the same (great) opponent for the THIRD time, the thing started resembling a parody. Best reason to see the film is, as the first reviewer points out, the presence of the smashingly beautiful and athletic Henstridge. Van Damme's performance is OK, as always.

In the south of France, Mikhail Suverov (Jean-Claude Van Damme) dies after a car chase. His doppelganger Alain Moreau is a policeman from Nice. It turns out that his mother had given up Mikhail to be adopted. He traces Mikhail back to NYC tracking down Alex Bohemia. People mistakes him for Mikhail. Alex (Natasha Henstridge) at the nightclub Bohemia is Mikhail's girlfriend. Mikhail had been trying to leave the Rusian mob run by Dmitri with lieutenant Ivan Dzasokhov. Corrupt FBI agents are also after evidence of their involvement with the mob hidden in a Nice bank.

The story is messy. It's too complicated. A little bit of simplification would allow the movie to concentrate on the action. It should have fewer bad guys and I don't know why he doesn't get help from his french police friends. A long distance call to his partner would have really helped. Van Damme and Henstridge are not necessarily great actors but they give their best effort. There is plenty of action. There are fight action, gun action, stunts and car chases. One of the problems of a complicated story is the need for exposition. It slows down the movie when it's not done well. The movie slows down in many spots.

While not necessarily one of my favorites from his more "classic" collection (Bloodsport, Kickboxer, etc.), I give this one a lot of credit for creating an overall highly suspenseful experience, full of intense action/chase sequences, and with more of a story than many other action-oriented efforts in its class. The script by Larry Ferguson (writer of The Hunt for Red October and definitely one of the more respected people to pen a Van Damme movie) places storytelling over action setups and, in general, feels a bit smarter than the average Van Damme vehicle. There isn't any real mystery to the story, though: the revelation of Alain's brother and his affiliation with the Russian mafia is dealt with without too much buildup, and the story begins to revolve around Alain retreading his brother's unsuccessful steps to distance himself from the mob and escape from corrupt FBI agents. His relationship with his brother's old flame (Natasha Henstridge, Species) is interesting at first but is then more or less dropped into your lap. Nevertheless, the movie never loses a sense of suspense: Alain doesn't seem quite as empowered as other characters Van Damme was playing at the time, so it rarely seems impossible that he could be killed. Soundly-weighed production values by director Lam help set a good mood and the art direction is, at times, inspired.

The film features a pretty good cast, including Jean-Hugues Anglade (Betty Blue) as Alain's partner and David Hemblen (Exotica) in a limited role as the leader of the Russian mafia, but the unexpected dramatic moment of the picture belongs to Van Damme for a surprisingly adept instance of silent acting near the end of the movie wherein Alain listens to a recorded message by his late brother. Ringo Lam would continue to bring a little something extra out of Jean-Claude in the future, even directing him to his first-ever dramatic award nomination five years later, but "Maximum Risk" is probably the most palatable of all their collaborations for its all-around strengths and mainstream appeal.

Overall rating: 7 out of 10.

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

Maximum Risk (1996) is honestly one of my favorite Van Damme movies. I used to own this movie on VHS was the first Van Damme movie I had on VHS. Until I throw it in the trash last year. So I bought this movie on Blu-ray. Van Damme plays completely different character than we know and It is pretty good. Natasha Henstridge is completely unknown actress in this movie and I like her a lot. I love this movie to death! It was one of the movies with Van Damme, I have grown up. I think Jean-Claude Van Damme is a great underrated actor and a great martial artists action star. Maximum Risk (1996)was the movie that my mom bought me on VHS tape when I was a child. I bagged her for this movie, she fulfilled my wish and I got the tape. I kept watching it and I love this action movie. In my opinion it is a huge improvement over Sudden Death. This was Van Damme's serious role I have ever saw. His character Alain Moreau is serious. He is a French cop who was in a military.

Jean-Claude Van Damme is in his seriously double role again as Mikhail Suverov and Alain Moreau. In the opening scene we see Van Damme been chased by these guys, one of them is Paul Ben-Victor, the two guys and nice foot chase Van Damme's character jumps from the building on the balcony that is hanged in front another building and hangs him self on the fence, tries to move him self up but the balcony breaks down and Van Damme falls down. Than he runs steals some motorcycle and crashes and falls in to another car's windshield, his character is dead. But than we see again Van Damme, Alain is at a funeral that is being held for a fellow cop, when Alain's partner Sebastien (Jean-Hugues Anglade) shows up, and requests for his presence at a crime scene. When they arrive, Sebastien shows Alain a dead body of someone that looks exactly like him. They discover that his name was Mikhail Suvorov, who was born on exactly the same day Alain was. As it turns out, Mikhail is the twin brother Alain never knew he had.

So now Alain traces his brother's steps back to New York City, Alain travels to New York City to find more about his brother and he discovers that Mikhail was a member of the Russian Mafia, who was chased down and killed when he attempted to get out. Of course, now Alain is mistaken for Mikhail, who was also mixed up in a series of affairs concerning the FBI and the Russian mafia. With his only real ally being Mikhail's fiancé Alex Bartlett (Natasha Henstridge), Alain sets out to avenge his brother's death, which is complicated not only by the Mafia, but by two corrupt FBI agents. You have nice martial arts in here, great action sequences. Realistic gun shots fire, like Van Damme pulls his gun on the van and fire at the assailant, killing the man with one shot. The van explodes while Van Damme saves his partner's life and the bad guy Ivan Dzasokhov (Zach Grenier) get's killed. I liked the ending scene where Van Damme fight's off the henchman rogue FBI agent Paul Ben-Victor who try's to kill him with a chainsaw. That scene was a bad ass.

Ringo Lam did made a great job directing Maximum Risk with Van Damme, it was their first movie working together. In the future they worked together in Replicant (2001) another Van Damme twins movie in which a retired FBI Agent is chasing a serial killer (Van Damme) with the help of his clone. I always liked that movie, but I love this one so much better! And In Hell (2003) another different prison movie with Van Damme in it. I think they both did a solid job directing and filming this martial arts action flick! Natasha Henstridge was really a beautiful girl as Mikael's girlfriend, I been a fan of here. I absolutely loved her in Species and Ghosts of Mars. I always watched Species the original movie, but I have never watched the sequels. Natasha Henstridge is very gorgeous sexy and beautiful in this movie.

Maximum Risk is the 1996 action film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as Alain Moreau, a cop working in Nice, France, who discovers that a body at murder scene is the twin brother he never knew he had. Upon further investigation, Alain finds out that his twin was part of the Russian mafia and had a fiancée (Natasha Henstridge) and then finds himself on the run from the mobsters when he's mistaken for his brother. The film was helmed by Hong Kong director Ringo Lam, who would later collaborate with Van Damme for 2001's Replicant and 2003's In Hell. That is the basic plot. I am giving this movie a 10, of one of my all time favorite Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

This Jean-Claude Van Damme action vehicle gets good marks for sound, low profanity, some very good action scenes and some interesting characters that keep your attention. It loses marks for excessive violence, too much "Rambo" mentality (good guys don't get hit despite a barrage of bullets) and, yet, another modern-day film in which the FBI is corrupt.

This is also another of these action films that has TOO much action. It would be better with some more lulls. It almost gets ridiculous in spots. Nevertheless, some of the scenes such as car chases, fires and explosions are so well-done you have to admire the great stunt work in here. Man, those stunt men earn their money!

You would be hard-pressed to find two leads in any film with the bodies of Van Damme and Natasha Henstridge and neither are shy about showing them off, so you have the usual gratuitous sex scenes, but they are brief, as is the profanity. This is a loud film. If you have good speakers, be ready to have the room shake with lots of bass.

Overall, it's about 100 minutes of mindless but entertaining diversion.

My Age: 13

A French policeman, played by Jean-Claude Van Damme, finds that he has a twin brother, but he has just been murdered. Soon all of his brother's problems come to trouble him, as everyone believes that he is his brother, including his brother's girlfriend, Alex, played by Natasha Henstridge. Together they go on the run from the Russian Mafia and the FBI.

"Maximum Risk" is much more fun and entertaining that most of Van Damme's mostly tedious films. Van Damme puts in his usual average performance, and Natasha Henstridge adds some much needed sizzle and romance. There are plenty of fights, explosions and violence as there always are in Van Damme films. It has more plot than most of his films, too.

Australian Classification: M 15+: Medium Level Violence, Low Level Sex Scenes, Low Level Coarse Language

Rating: 70 out of 100

Alain Moreau is a cop in France who cannot believe his eyes when a murder victim is the spitting image of him. He confronts his mother and learns that she had had twins but had to give one of them up. Wanting to solve the murder of his estranged twin, Alain follows a trail that leads him to a New York that is cold and full of snow and finds himself sucked into his brother's world where he finds himself with his brother's beautiful girlfriend all over him. However Alain also inherits his brother's problems some of which include Russian gangsters who want to kill him.

This film wastes no time in getting the plot established and flying Alain into his first fight as quickly as possible and I can understand why this was the case. The plot is thin to say the least and it is best not to apply too much logic to any of it because the whole thing is an excuse for Van Damme to just do the things in this film that he does in all his films. This includes speaking in a strange accent, being naked with a beautiful female co-star and kicking people in lots of exciting ways. All these boxes are ticked here and as such it does what you would expect from a Van Damme film and it will depend on the individual viewer whether or not that gets you interested or sees you running the opposite direction. For me it is somewhere in the middle because I accept the bad and in return veg out in front of a dumb action movie. The plot gets no better and every time it needs to add story to create more action you can almost see it straining with the effort.

The action is mostly pretty good although it was a bit disappointing to see how Ringo Lam had toned down the style for his first American film; only here and there did the film get close to the mayhem in the action that he is known for. Van Damme is quite good though, for course he is a clunky actor and here he seems to have had his charisma filtered out but in the action sequences he is a marvel – very athletic and impressive and his physical presence helps a lot. Henstridge takes care of the "co-star who will get her t1ts out" requirement of the film but other than that she could have been anyone. The Wire's Ben Victor is so-so and yet I found it ironic that he had his last big scene in a cooler full of dead pigs because he had spent so much of the rest of the film surrounded by big hams too – Grenier in particular comes to mind.

Overall then this is a solid Van Damme film with all the plusses and minuses that one would expect. The plot is poor and the acting leaves a lot to desire but the action is fun even if I was hoping for more from Lam.

First of all, I'd like to apologize for the very bad pun I put in the one line summary, but it's late, and I swear, it sounded much better in my head. However, it is fairly accurate; the film is exactly like every other movie Van Damme has done. The lame one-liners, the cliché dialog, the stereotype characters, the decent-at-best action... I was honestly barely paying attention to this film, partly because I had seen it before, once, and couldn't remember if it was good or not(believe me, had I remembered it, I never would have watched it), but mainly because every time I did pay attention I almost instantly wound up mocking and laughing at what went on on-screen. It's just so typical and by-the-numbers that it's ridiculous. Every single action scene involved stuff that we've seen before(and more than enough of), every line of dialog tried to be clever but wound up being embarrassing, each of the "cool" villains were just too damn stereotypical and the whole thing was so preposterous and predictable that it was laughable rather than anything else. The plot is predictable and poorly paced. It's about... uh, Van Damme #1 gets killed, Van Damme #2 finds out #1 existed, some tame unrealistic fighting ensues, Van Damme breaks bones with the ease that only he and Steven Seagal can manage... eh, something else happens... like I said, I wasn't really paying very much attention to it. The one good thing I can say about this, and a lot of people will probably crucify me for saying this, but I have to say it; Natasha Henstridge looks hot as hell in this film, and if you are ever forced to watch this for whatever reason, or you find yourself being half bored by the film, stay awake for the sole reason of seeing her getting her freak on... the one bad thing about is that Damme is there too, but that is tolerable to see Natasha like that. If you're having trouble sitting through it, think of Natasha, look forward to the scene, or, even better, do what I did; laugh. Laugh at every single cliché-like and stereotypical thing that happens in the movie. That'll take you through it. What else is there to say... cinematography is uninspired, dialog is badly written, action is tiresome and not particularly well-choreographed, acting is decent, characters are cliché-like and stereotypical with not one shred of personality or development. What can I say; a decent at best typical Van Damme movie. I recommend it to fans of Jean-Claude Van Damme and anyone who are willing to sit through about 100 minutes of bad action flick to see Natasha Henstridge naked. 5/10

The movie is not that bad, Ringo Lam sucks. I hate when Van Damme has love in his movies, van Damme is good only when he doesn't have love in his movies.

Maximum Risk has always been a favourite of mine. Ringo Lam makes his Hollywood debut, much like John Woo had with Hard Target, and incredibly with Van Damme as well. Maximum Risk is a slower Van Damme film and was largely ignored at the time of release. Sadly Van Dammes mismanagement of film choices and production problems had started to catch up with him at this point. It's a good film and underrated. It's hard to find and I could only view on DVD. Still enjoy this film after all these years.

After watching 'Legionnaire' and 'Death Warrant', I finally get back to a movie in which Van Damme gets to do a lot of what he does best: kick lots of random people in the head. I always knew I was easily amused, but 'Maximum Risk' really demonstrates that fact.

Van Damme plays Alain Moreau, a French cop who discovers he has a twin brother, Mikhail. Trouble is, Mikhail is suffering from a slight case of death. To find out why Mikhail was murdered, Alain must simply travel to New York (which in the tradition of 'Rumble in the Bronx', is actually Toronto), assume Mikhail's identity, and beat up as many Russian mafia goons as he can in 90 minutes. Simple, no? Awesome, no?

OK, maybe I'm talking 'Maximum Risk' up a bit. Sure, it lacks any development in story and characters, and any attempt is minimal (all are good things whenever I'm concerned), but even with Ringo Lam at the helm, this is nowhere near Van Damme's best effort. The action scenes are good, but nothing special.

'Maximum Risk' is really only for Van Damme fans. Van Damme fans who haven't seen it should check it out, but if you're looking for a more solid action movie, he has a fair few better movies around - 5/10

If you see only one Van Damme film...see Maximum Risk. It is a decent thriller, not just a martial arts flick. Unfortunately, after seeing how good Van Damme can be (yes, he can act - something we've yet to see from Stephen Seagal who he's usually compared to) it makes you sad to see how many bad films he's really made.

While SUDDEN DEATH was merely a serviceable DIE HARD clone, this film cemented Van Damme's decline from the powerhouse stardom he enjoyed in the early 90's. Unfortunately this film set the blueprint for what was to come; uninspired plot involving assassins after some important document that requires Van Damme to go overseas with another Hong Kong director brought in to breathe life into the tired surroundings. This formula would rinse and repeat for most of the next decade with the budgets for Van Damme's films getting smaller and smaller.

The one thing here of note would be his pairing with sexy starlet Henstridge, fresh off her career defining role in SPECIES. The two of them have a decent chemistry, but as usual for female characters in these sorts of films, she's a pretty underwritten stock character. It's a little creepy too to see him fill in for his deceased brother and allow the two of them to get as far as 3rd base before he tells her that her actual fiance is dead and that he's just an identical twin. Then, in a move very similar to the widow of the current president's deceased son, she immediately decides to keep it "all in the family" for her next beau.

The action scenes come off mostly pretty well though the last act stands as being particularly uninspired, especially as the two end baddies don't represent much of a threat to the hero. This isn't a particularly "big" movie with the spectacle or grit of his earlier films but moves at a decently quick pace. Sure the logic of how a French policeman can skip to NYC and get away with all kinds of extrajudicial killings never really gets resolved, but then again the movie shows about as much interest in logic as it does in the continuity of how many belongings Van Damme has on him at any point in the film and where he's storing them.

Worth a watch on a rainy day afternoon, but to skip it won't detract from your life in the slightest.