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.

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.

"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

The Story: Alain, a French policeman, is shocked to discover that he had a twin brother when his body is found in Nice. Investigating the murder, he finds out that he was in possession of a list that details the deeds of the Russian Mafia. Helped by his brother's girlfriend, Alain dodges Russian gangsters & corrupt FBI agents while trying to find the list."Maximum Risk" is another one of the long list of action films that feature Jean-Claude Van Damme. As far as things go, it is strictly formulaic. The script sticks to the clichés & the acting is mediocre. There are some nicely done action sequences, with an inventive car chase, a fight in a burning building, an escape through rooftops, a brutal fight in an elevator & JCVD fleeing his enemies over an elevated train line. Director Ringo Lam keeps everything going at a reasonable pace.