Maximum Risk

 
Director: Ringo Lam
Year: 1966
Rating: 7.0
And then Ringo Lam came. John Woo had opened the door to Hollywood with Hard Target in 1993 and other Hong Kongers would soon follow. Jean-Claude Van Damme has to be thanked - not only with Lam and Woo but later with Tsui Hark. A few Chinese actors made the jump as well - Chow Yun-fat, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, Sammo, Jackie and Zhang Ziyi are the best known but others like Simon Yam, Karen Mok, Fan Bingbing, Li Bingbing had smaller roles. Part of this recruitment is of course due to wanting to appeal to a Chinese audience. Not to mention all the action choreographers who changed how action was done in Hollywood. One of the reasons for attempting to break into Hollywood was money and US citizenship status because of the impending Handover. In the end though they all went back to Hong Kong where they were loved and respected and have integrated themselves into the Mainland film industry. Some pathetically so.

 

Ringo Lam is often bunched in with John Woo as a master of the Heroic Bloodshed genre. True to some extent but misleading. Like Woo, Lam had been directing comedies until Woo's breakout A Better Tomorrow which was followed by Lam's City on Fire. But Lam then launched into his On Fire films - Prison on Fire 1 & 2 and School on Fire. They were hard-hitting, at times brutal films but not Heroic Bloodshed. The same with Wild Search that throws in a sweet romance in the middle of violent terrain. Full Contact was wonderful and wacky with Chow Yun-fat and Simon Yam giving off the wall performances. The three later films of Full Alert, The Suspect and Victim are tense brilliantly plotted films. He is more street level and gritty than Woo is. More complex narratives. His death at 63-years old was a tragedy. This isn't as good as Hard Target - mainly because of the insertion of a misguided and creepy romance. But there are some fine action set-pieces, more of a reliance on martial arts than guns and has some scary stunts right from the opening scene till the end.

 

This gets off to a jump start with a group of men chasing after Van Damme in France. Lam knows how to stage a chase and this is a good one - from roofs to the streets - but shockingly Van Damme is killed. Well, that is a surprise I thought but we will no doubt get a flashback. But it is a worse cliché - twins who didn't know they had a twin. Lam had directed The Twin Dragons with Jackie a few years earlier. Separated at birth. One was kept by the mother, the other adopted by Russians. The Russian one is dead and the other wants to find out why. To do that he has to go to America as his brother where he finds out that his brother was in the Russian mob and that he had a hot girlfriend (Natasha Henstridge). Who thinks he is his brother and wants to get down to business. Turns out that the brother betrayed the mob and that it was the corrupt FBI that was chasing him in France.  The mob wants to kill him and the FBI wants to catch him for nefarious reasons. Ringo was to direct JCVD in two future films - Replicant and In Hell, neither of which I have seen and they sound awful (but two people told me they were actually decent enough).