Maximum Risk
Another Jean-Claude Van Damme film with twins, this is becoming an obsession.
This is almost like Bad Company. A Russian mobster found out he had a long lost twin in France, that’s a way to get out. He gets together a NOC list for the mobsters, as insurance, but gets whacked by FBI agents operating in France for some reason. His brother is a cop and assumes his identity for a while.
He goes to New York and meets a wacky cab driver, fan of Brett Easton Ellis, who keeps getting him out of sticky situations. After being chased by Russian mobsters and finally meeting “Alex Euphoria”, Natasha from the nightclub.
Zanzibar is a strip club where the woman keep their tops on, but it’s not a classy joint, Playboy style, it’s sleazy, that reason must be to keep the film rating low.
Natasha Henstridge is still contractually mandated to show her tits, in a voyeuristic fashion, after a very horny close up on her bra. She disappears after a while, then comes back for a bizarre sex scene out of nowhere, where we nearly see his butt.
There’s a big fight scene in a sauna years before Eastern Promises, saying it doesn’t hold a candle to it is a severe understatement. It involves Russian mobsters in Little Odessa, no way that’s a coincidence.
The mobsters know more that the narrator, they know things impossible to find out, and even kidnap a random French cop, friend of the protagonist. The woman is not the hostage for some unexplained reason.
The protagonist also gets a safety deposit box with money, guns and an explanation of it all. Yes, it an exposition dump with an emotionless voice, why do you ask? They even ask for his mother’s maiden name, like all good identity verification protocols.
Then there’s a big climatic fight sequence, something extremely wacky and chaotic, closer to Tintin, with MacGuyver traits. Goofy-ass insanity.
The final chase sequence is a nice mirror of the opening, where the dirty feds are the ones being chased, and they have the girl. Our protagonist slaps them with his Renault 5! But it’s not over, the true ending in in the slaughterhouse, where the bad guy waves a chainsaw around full sized pig carcasses hanging from the ceiling. I’m not even sure those aren’t real meat!
In the end, the dead twin brother trusts his life to a ex-soldier stranger, and even his woman switches over to him, meeting his fucking mother! She met him two days ago, for crying out loud!
Hid mother is played by a French actress from Buñuel films, that’s a deep cut. She doesn’t even appear in the end, it’s a one scene affair.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.