Explainer | ‘Who can forget the sauna fight?’ Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Maximum Risk, its director’s Hollywood debut, been all but erased from Ringo Lam’s canon. It’s worth another look
- The Belgian martial-arts star wanted to work with Hong Kong’s Ringo Lam, but their first film together, Maximum Risk, lacked the director’s usual flourishes
- The 1996 movie has been all but erased from Lam’s canon, despite featuring ‘a couple of great car sequences’ and ‘a really fun elevator fight’, expert says
Top Hong Kong action film director Ringo Lam Ling-tung first went to Hollywood in the early 1990s, around the same time as John Woo Yu-sum. But he became bored by the slow pace of moviemaking there, and especially disliked the many rounds of meetings required to get a picture into production.
“I have talked with producers, but by the time they finish talking up the script, or rounding up the stars, I have usually started on a [Hong Kong] movie, and have been unable to take the offer,” he said in an interview with the Post’s Winnie Chung.
So whereas Woo, who really wanted to succeed in the US, stayed in Hollywood, Lam continued to focus on his work in Hong Kong.
It was not until 1996’s Maximum Risk, a contemporary actioner, that the director made a Hollywood film. It’s a sprawling thriller revolving around a New York cop, played by Jean Claude Van Damme, who’s searching for the killers of his twin brother – a sibling he was unaware of until his corpse turned up.
Lam only took the US project because everything moved very quickly. The film’s producer, Moshe Diamant, who’d made his name repackaging ninja films for US release in the 1980s, contacted Lam when he was on holiday in Toronto in 1995 with his family.
