Neither Nor

1) Who The Fuck Is Ringo Lam?

Why, he’s a Hong Kong director / producer / scriptwriter (thanks, Wikipedia!) that’s about to enter his fourth decade of filmmaking, though it doesn’t seem like he’s done anything since contributing to 2007’s Triangle. Unfortunately, for those of us Westerners not well versed in Hong Kong cinema, Lam is known mostly for two things:

a) Trying to follow the lead of fellow Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo and break into Hollywood via Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicles (like Replicant)

b) Directing a film (1987’s City on Fire) that might’ve kinda sorta served as the uncredited inspiration / template for 1992’s Reservoir Dogs. This ten-minute film comparing the two films is either damning proof that Tarantino’s a shameless rip-off artist, or welcome evidence that Tarantino knows how to go green.

2) A Double Shot of JCVD

Not only is Replicant Lam’s second time working with the Muscles, but it’s also Van Damme’s second time playing two roles in a film. Ten years prior, during his action-star prime, Van Damme played twins in Double Impact (not, as I had thought before checking IMDB, Double Team, his buddy-what vehicle with Dennis Rodman). For Replicant, JCVD plays twins of a decidedly different stripe.

When sporting the Tommy Wiseau Wet Mop hair style and scowling like his last residual check bounced, he’s The Torch, an infamous serial killer known for killing women and, as you might’ve guessed, setting them on fire. However, when he’s sporting a more restrained and streamlined ‘do, and a slightly added / dopey look on his face, then he’s The Replicant, a clone created by scientists to help the police get into the mind of The Torch and track him down. Though I’m not sure you want to get into the head of a man who thinks a capable police-evading alias is Edward Garrotte; I guess Jonathan Firebug was taken?

Being a newly-created clone, there’s plenty of scenes where JCVD gets to act like an honest-to-goodness(albeit ridiculously flexible) man-child, including His First Time Having Sex, His First Time In An Acrobatic Fight Scene, and (most importantly) His First Time Getting Chained To A Water Pipe And Getting Wrongfully Bitchslapped By Michael Rooker For Hurting His Son, Which He Totally Didn’t Do. And speaking of…

3) Michael Rooker, Professional Actor

I’m not sure if it’s all that bad when being an actor means you have to take a paycheck doing work like Replicant, but as someone with a hate-hate relationship with his current 9-to-5, I can imagine that this sort of clock-punching can’t be good for one’s well-being, if one has aspirations to do Great Things. Unless, of course, you’re happy to punch the clock working on a movie set, and don’t mind doing shit like this when the other option is actually having a 9-to-5. And when you have work like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Eight Men Out, JFK, and Mississippi Burning in your CV (among other roles) (Slither fans, show some love), fuck it. I say dumb shit all day, on and off the clock, and I don’t get paid that much for it, and I certainly don’t get to pretend that I’m escaping the blast-radius of a bomb disguised as a computer printer while dumb-shitting all over the place.

4) Catherine Dent, Leading Lady (Sorta)

I should probably mention that I was only half-watching Replicant; I was on my laptop doing stuff of a time-killing nature, and wanted something visual in the background as some sort of aural white noise. I only point out Catherine Dent because she is nominally the leading lady in this thing (she’s a cop, like Michael Rooker, I think?), and because I loved her work in The Shield. Also, the new show from Shield creator Shawn Ryan, The Chicago Code, premiers this week, so there’s some synergy there. I was always fond of the way her character on The Shield, Danny Sofer, was last shown on the series’ finale, ducking back into the Barn’s break room to blown out a candle on a birthday cupcake (if I recall correctly) before running back out to deal with some police business. It was a nice little grace note, on a finale full of nice grace notes (“nice” being a relative term, given what happens in some spots). PS – watch The Shield.

5) One Out-Of-Place High-Quality Action Sequence

So, as I mentioned, I was barely watching this thing, except to note one scene (the Michael Rooker JCVD Bitchslap scene) that made me realize I had non-watched some of this before. I’ll admit that I took a break from whatever important work I was doing to watch The Replicant make time with a hooker, if only to see how they worked out the “first time” thing while also invariably addressing the “clone of a lady killer” thing. Which was addressed, of course, in that half-ass straight-to-video first-draft-script way that can only happen in a movie of Replicant’s caliber.

But there’s one sequence near the end, where the Wiseau’d Van Damme is being pursued by Rooker in a hospital parking garage, and JCVD (driving an ambulance) tries to shake off the hanging-on Rooker by cutting every corner close while simultaneously speeding down the garage exit ramps. In a movie full of nonsense (and the sort of nonsense that transcends a full attention span and non-muted volume), that sequence, which lasted a good 2-3 minutes, was surprisingly good.

It reminded me a bit of a similar parking-garage sequence in The Dark Knight, but only because I wish Nolan had done as much as Lam did with the using-walls-as-human-squeege threat. (No threat of any City of Fire-type theft accusations, thankfully / unfortunately.)  Even the inevitable crash-ending had the sort of visceral kineticism I wouldn’t have imagined coming from this film. Unfortunately, YouTube doesn’t do right by this scene, instead offering only a slew of Replicant trailers, in case you actually think of giving this film the time of day.