This 1996 Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle is 28% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, where 37% of the audience reports liking it.
It has no Metacritic score.
Synopsis
Alain Moreau (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is a French cop who gets called to a crime scene because the corpse, Mikhail, looks just like him. When Alain tells his mother about it, she tells him that Mikhail must be his twin brother, who she had to give up because they were so poor. Curious about his brother, Alain goes to New York and assumes his identity.
The nearer he gets to the truth, the closer he gets to the edge.
(Man, you gotta love cheesy ‘90s marketing)
Verdict
It’s too bad that this movie isn’t better, but it’s not.
This was Hong Kong director Ring Lam’s introduction to the West. His movie, City on Fire, is one of the inspirations behind Reservoir Dogs.
Sadly, Maximum Risk wasn’t going to win him any fans.
Sadder still is that this movie’s potential is so obvious, and so obviously squandered.
I’ve made my fair share of “Jean-Claude Gosh Darn” jokes. Some might say more than my fair share. The man has earned some of the derision he receives.
So when I say that he’s convincing at the beginning of this movie, I’m surprised, too.
As Alain, he’s genuinely baffled, and Van Damme evinces a sincere sorrow at having never known Alain’s twin brother. His scenes with his partners on the force and with his mother are sincere and convincing.
Then the movie starts falling apart.
The movie is missing the dialogue and action to explain Alain’s curiosity about his brother. We’re never sure why he’s willing to go to the lengths that he does to investigate Mikhail’s life.
This could have been a really convincing, emotional, movie about the tragedy of an orphan boy growing up with a foster family in New York, falling in with a gang, and eventually getting killed because of his criminal activity. You could tell that story in parallel with the story of his twin investigating after his death.
Maximum Risk starts out as that movie…and then it goes somewhere else.
Zach Grenier and Paul Ben-Victor are both terrific character actors. Ben-Victor, in particular, creates an intriguing character here (Grenier may have gotten better material after the movie lost my attention, but I wouldn’t know). However, neither actor gets a thoroughly developed character.
That’s a shame, because by the time this came out, Larry Ferguson had written for Highlander, Beverly Hills Cop II, The Presidio, The Hunt for Red October, and Alien3. The man knew how to write.
None of the post-Mikhail crime is very interesting. We’re not invested because Van Damme, who displays some acting chops here, doesn’t get the material to relate the gang plot to Alain’s quest to learn about his brother.
Now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention another co-star, Natasha Henstridge. She was great in Species (her first movie), but didn’t get much good material after that (The Whole Nine Yards and Ghosts of Mars being obvious exceptions). This was only her third film.
Henstridge plays Mikhail’s lover. This is a third movie that Maximum Risk has to carry. In addition to a movie about a twin looking into his brother’s death, and a New York crime drama, there’s a star-crossed love story here.
As Alex Minetti, Natasha Henstridge is smart, tough, and vulnerable. It’s almost worth trying to pay attention long enough to see how she handles the revelation that Alain is not Mikhail. Almost.
Overall
Unusually, this movie is not held back by Van Damme’s acting, or lack thereof. It crumbles under the weight of an unfocused script.
