Mjeteconer Just perfect...

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Prismark10 JCVD joins forces with another rising Hong Kong action director making his American cinema debut. By this time Van Damme's career had started a decline already.JCVD plays Alain, a cop who finds out that he had a twin brother Mikhail involved with Russian gangsters in the USA who have had him killed in a hilarious chase sequence on a bike at the beginning of the film set in the south of France.Alain goes to New York looking for these Russian bad guys, he gets involved with his late brother's girlfriend, a eccentric taxi driver and crosses path with some dicey FBI agents.The plot is mundane and too slow. The action scenes seem lazily staged, JCVD fights the same henchman three times in the film. The chase sequences look inept with explosions coming out of nowhere.

jonathanruano "Maximum Risk" would have been a good picture, except that there were so many fight scenes and shoot outs, so much vandalism, and so many explosions that they almost crowded out the film's human characters. And this is the main flaw of "Maximum Risk": it should have been about its human characters. The story of Alain Moreau's (Jean Claude Van Damme) search for the people who killed his brother Mikhail Suvurov had the makings of a good film and maybe even a great film, as British director Mike Hodges proved when he directed Michael Caine in Get Carter (1974). Moreover, this film also makes it clear that Alain did not know he had a brother, until he learnt of Mikhail's premature and violent death -- and this was another opening that the filmmakers of "Maximum Risk" should have exploited more fully by writing better dialogue and better scenes for the actors and cutting back on the explosions and vandalism. Yet all of these opportunities were squandered because the filmmakers decided to dumb down this picture. Jean Claude Van Damme, for example, gets even fewer lines than the ones delivered by Natasha Henstridge (who plays Alain's love interest, Alex Minetti), even though he is supposed to be the protagonist in this picture.Now this film is not all bad. The set-up for this picture was good and I also liked the small twist two-thirds into the film, where we see a rare thing in a JCVD movie: Jean Claude Van Damme successfully making a cogent argument involving some sophisticated analysis. But the main strength of this picture has to be Natasha Henstridge's performance as the JCVD love interest, Alex Minetti. Henstridge may not have the best dialogue to work with, but she is able to imbue her lines with enough emotion and intensity to make her character seem plausible. She is probably the most interesting thing in this picture. Jean Claude Van Damme, by contrast, can do little more than reprise his bad boy (who always gets into fights and gets his face bruised) role from films like "Death Warrant," "Double Impact," and "Nowhere to Run." He is not doing anything new in this picture that he did not do far better in previous films and, what is more, we do not even see him do much of his choreographed karate either. Overall a disappointing film.5.4/10

Comeuppance Reviews Alain Moreau (Van Damme) is a French cop who just discovered he has a twin brother. His name was Mikhail Suverov and he worked for the Russian mob. To get to the truth about his life, he travels to New York City, specifically the Little Odessa area. While there he must fight gangsters, as well as double-dealing FBI agents. But just about everyone thinks he's Mikhail. Luckily his brother's girlfriend Alex (Henstridge) is along for the ride. Now Alain has to make it back to France in one piece, but not before causing some major Van Damage in the big apple! Maximum Risk is from the good old days when Van Damme movies went to the theater. Thus, it has a high-quality look and feel, and seems to have a decent budget behind it. It's nice to see the high production values used well by the great Ringo Lam, who would later team up with Van Damme again for Replicant and In Hell (2003).It must be in Van Damme's contract to be in movies where he plays two roles. Most actors never get this chance, but Van Damme has. FIVE times. The movies being Double Impact (1991), Maximum Risk, Replicant (2001), Timecop (1994) and The Order (2001). Just why he feels there aren't enough Van Dammes currently on earth, outside of ego, has yet to be explained. To further emphasize his "double" life, here, in Maximum Risk, Van Damme seeing his reflection is a theme throughout the movie. Glasses, windows, picture frames, and of course mirrors are all employed for psychological purposes. But really this movie is an entertaining thriller that is palatable for general audiences. You don't have to be a Van Damme or martial arts freak to enjoy Maximum Risk.Say what you will about him, but Van Damme has more emotion than Chuck Norris. Or Don "The Dragon" Wilson. Speaking of Wilson, just as his Bloodfist movies are all 80 minutes, it seems another contract demand of Van Damme is that his movies be at least 100 minutes. Maximum Risk is no exception, so naturally there's some filler, but not much. And a classic cliché is on display: the "wacky taxi driver" is on show once again, but at least this time he has a more substantial part to play than usual.Following another JCVD rule, there has to be a scene where he gets nude or semi-nude. Why, we don't know. Here it's the time-honored bathhouse fight, also seen in such movies as Red Heat (1988) and Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991). But at least there's some Natasha Henstridge nudity as well to right the ship. Henstridge, in only her second-ever movie role (after Species, 1995), looks great, and it's sad to see her end up in Scott Wiper crud like A Better Way to Die (2000), but hey, you gotta make a living.Maximum Risk is solid, undemanding entertainment seemingly made to make the careers of Van Damme and Ringo Lam go over well with larger audiences. Watching it today, it's classic 90's fun that's easy to like.For more insanity, please visit: comeuppancereviews.com

Michael DeZubiria 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