Maximum Risk is Yet ANOTHER Disappointing Thriller Where Jean-Claude Van Damme Plays Long Lost Identical Twins
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I try to be an optimist when it comes to movies new and old. That means that I never stop being disappointed. For example, when a kind, much-appreciated patron paid me to re-watch and write about the poorly received 1991 Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Double Impact I got excited.
I saw Double Impact when it came out because at that age I would literally see anything and also because I heard that it contained naked boobs and vividly remember coming away bitterly disappointed by everything but the quality of the naked boobs on display.
Yet hope springs eternal as well as infernal so I nevertheless found myself thinking, “There’s no way a movie where international action superstar Jean-Claude Van Damme plays long lost identical twins can’t be at least a little bit awesome.”
Then I rewatched Double Impact and learned that there was DEFINITELY a way for a movie where Jean-Claude Van Damme plays long lost identical twins to be extremely, aggressively, even surreally non-awesome.
That predictable disappointment somehow did not keep me from looking up the plot of 1996’s Maximum Risk and once again saying, incorrectly, “there’s no way that a movie where international action superstar Jean-Claude Van Damme plays long lost identical twins can’t be at least a little awesome.”
I was once again wrong! I’m wrong a lot! All the time, even! I’m not even sure why you’re reading this website. It’s probably because it’s more important to be interesting than right and I am, at the very least, interesting.
The same cannot be said of Maximum Risk, unfortunately. It’s frustrating because it screws up in pretty much the exact same way Double Impact does.
Double the Van Dammes/Van Dammeage seems to me to be a sure-fire recipe for campy fun. Yet Double Impact and Maximum Risk puzzlingly decide to use the goofball premise of a martial artist playing identical twins who only discover they’re twins as adults as a showcase for Van Damme’s skills as a dramatic actor.
This should be a silly comedy. Instead it’s a heavy drama of family and redemption. Van Damme very briefly plays Mikhail Suverov, a street rat who was put up for adoption at birth, adopted by a Russian family that moved to the United States and went to work for the Russian Mafia. The unfortunate soul doesn’t even make it to the ten minute mark and dies a violent death after relieving the criminal organization of a sizable amount of loot. Cop Alain Moreau (also Van Damme), who grew up with his mother in Europe, is sent into investigate due to the curious coincidence of the dead man looking exactly like him and being born on the same day.
As in Double Impact, Van Damme seems only vaguely surprised to discover the existence of an exact double but he decides to put his resemblance to the dead man to good use by impersonating him as a way of infiltrating the Russian mob.
A savvier and sillier movie would at least try to eke fish out of water comedy out of this serious man having to step inside the shoes and life of his criminal double. Not Maximum Risk. It seems offended by the idea that there might be anything goofy or silly about Jean-Claude Van Damme playing identical twins.
Fresh off her star-making role in Species Natasha Henstridge is cursed with the thankless but oft-nude role of Alex Bartlett, who works for the mob and has a history with Mikhail Suverov and is intrigued by the man who looks exactly like him.
Amazon describes Maximum Risk as an erotic thriller as well as an action thriller, which is to say that it contains gratuitous nudity as well as gratuitous bloodshed. Like Double Impact, Maximum Risk profoundly misunderstands its star’s appeal.
Maximum Risk makes the tragic mistake of not allowing Jean-Claude Van Damme to have fun and be fun. It gives him a dreadful hairstyle that undercuts his androgynous beauty, then favors an endless series of car chases rather than action set pieces show-casing its star’s preternatural grace and athleticism.
It’s seldom a good thing when you can single out the one or two moments in a movie that do not beg to be forgotten the moment the credits end but I can point out the two moments here that stand out.
In one Van Damme just barely avoids being destroyed by a subway car in New York. A henchman is not so lucky. In the other Van Damme fights a man who brandishes an electric chainsaw that makes him a deadly danger to his foe but to himself as well.
Van Damme famously introduced a slew of Hong Kong giants to the United States to direct his films, including John Woo (Hard Target) and Tsui Hark (Knock Off, Double Team). Maximum Risk introduced American audiences to Ringo Lam, a Hong Kong filmmaker perhaps best known for directing 1987’s City on Fire, an action movie famous for its resemblance to Resevoir Dogs.
Lam makes a frustratingly generic debut here. Unlike Woo and Hark he’s not able to put a distinctive stamp on well-worn material. Lam would nevertheless go on to work with Van Damme twice more.
In 2001 Van Damme starred as a serial killer who sets mothers on fire and his clone in Lam’s Replicant and I might regret saying this but there’s no way that a movie where international action superstar Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a serial killer AND his crime-fighting clone can’t be at least a little bit awesome.
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