Product: Replicant [VHS] (2001)
Rating: 4.0
None Other Like It; A Very Good Van Damme Flick
For better or worse, Jean-Claude Van Damme holds an amount of recognition as "the guy who plays twins a lot."Double Impactwas cool andMaximum Riskwas a step out of the ordinary for the Muscles from Brussels, but I dare say that Van Damme's second outing with director Ringo Lam takes the cake as the best instance of the European karate expert playing two lookalikes. It's definitely one of the man's better outings of his DTV career, and definitely one of the strangest of all of his films, but it's strange in an entertaining sort of way, to the point that I'd advise all Van Damme fans to give it a buy if they can live without the usual abundance of martial arts.The story: detective Jake Riley (Michael Rooker,Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) ends his career unable to tie up the case of a mother-murdering serial killer (Van Damme). With murderer refusing to cease his killing spree, Jake engages in a national security project to clone the criminal and use the genetic memory inherited by his "replicant" to track down the real murderer.A point of interest: prior toJCVD, this is the only film for which Van Damme was nominated for a legitimate acting prize - the DVD Exclusive Award for "Best Actor." He didn't win, but nevertheless, it was nice to see some recognition for his efforts to become more than an action star. That being said, I think that only half of his performance deserves the nomination: as the replicant, Van Damme's relies almost entirely on physical expression and body language and therein pulls off one of the better performances of his career as a nave, newborn human, while his take on the killer is much less interesting than even his previous roles as bad guys. Other than him, the film doesn't have a very large starring cast but those involved generally do a good job. Michael Rooker is a vastly underrated actor who gives a very entertaining performance but has a bad habit of going off the cartoony end when he starts shouting. Catherine Dent (The Shield) co-stars as Riley's ex-partner, and while she doesn't have a lot of screentime, she makes good use of it. Marnie Alton would later be promoted to the role of Van Damme's wife inIn Hell, but here she plays a prostitute whom the replicant takes a liking to. Her scene is probably the most awkward one in the film, but she makes it work even when Van Damme is literally humping her leg.There is significantly less action in "Replicant" than there is in, say,Sudden Death, but if you're willing to wait for it, what's there is not bad at all. Martial arts are kept to a minimum, with the killer only throwing out a handful of kicks as he pursues his victims. The replicant steals the show: though he imitates his evil self to land a few roundhouse kicks in the film's finale, he utilizes gymnastics to great effect in four fun, acrobatic fight scenes. These parts are obviously filmed using a double, but it's close enough that you don't notice the exchange; the same goes for the scenes in which the replicant confronts his original self. In addition, there are some reasonably neat automobile stunts involving Michael Rooker getting hit by a car and one wherein a runaway ambulance ends up upside-down in a stairwell.Rooker's character comes off a bit unlikeable when he's callously unable to differentiate between the killer and the sympathetic replicant, and there's a bit of weird scene where he figures the only way he can locate a tracking device on the latter is to strip him down to his underwear and feel him up while his mother (the character's) watches. Other than that, it's a thoroughly high-end DTV film with an interesting story and great production values that take next to no sloppy shortcuts. Even non-Van Damme fans looking for an out-of-the-ordinary thriller wouldn't be ill-advised in checking this one out. Bit by bit, Van Damme is making himself more accessible to non-action fans, and this was a big step in the right direction.