Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
In Replicant we are introduced to our boy JCVD playing a serial killer. Naughty boy. Edward “the Torch” Garrotte has been leaving a trail of incinerated mothers across Seattle, with the lead investigator, Michael Rooker’s Detective Jake Riley unable to capture him, although he comes close in the film’s kick off cross town chase. However, as he’s retiring (somewhat early, it seems, Rooker’s not that old) so he’s closing the book on it and going home to be a family man.
Garrotte, however, isn’t done with the detective, making threatening phone calls and generally being a bit of a nuisance, so when a shady and apparently institutionally insane government agency shows up offering him another chance to get his man, he accepts. In stark defiance of all science, logic and reason, they have grown a clone of Garotte as a prototype of a terrorist capturing system, as their totally-a-thing genetic memories can be used to track them down, once they have been reactivated by… well, lets not look for explanations that don’t exist, even in the film’s universe.
To be fair to Riley, his first thought – we know exactly what he looks like now, let’s plaster the city with mugshots – is a very reasonable one, however one that can’t be done for the reason that a film has to be perpetrated upon us. So, instead, Riley is given custody of the replicant Garrotte, who is a quick study of gymnastics but essentially has the mind of a child otherwise, to try to raise, I guess, with the hopes of prompting clues to the real Garrotte’s location. Oh, and they’re apparently psychically linked too, because, screw it, why not. I’m only disappointed that they didn’t give them lightsabers.
Listeners, at this point we’re twenty minutes into the film, into which it has packed an impressively dense amount of nonsense. I had perhaps been hoping this would escalate into another Double Team, of podcasts passim. Sadly, the film settles into a nice relaxing coma for the next hour with very little of interest happening, apart perhaps from a few scenes where an understandably stressed and confused Riley takes out his frustrations physically and verbally on Clone Garrotte, which comes across a lot like child abuse, or kicking a puppy.
It picks up a little in the final stretch, with a fight in a geriatric ward where they’re throwing old geezers in wheelchairs at each other in a pretty decent action sequence, but that’s very much too little too late after a flat middle that’s taking a stupid concept altogether too seriously. I can’t lay much of the blame at Van Damme or Rooker’s feet, or even Ringo Lam’s, who are all more or less doing as well as they can with the material available to them. Lawrence Riggins and Les Weldon’s script just isn’t up to snuff, with a premise that needs to be either much more, or much less ridiculous.
While, as you’ve probably gathered by now, I do not recommend you seek out Replicant, I also can’t bring myself to say that I hate it. It’s ultimately a bit too dull to have too strong an opinion on it, which I certainly wasn’t expecting after that opening salvo of silliness. Back down the memory hole you go, and I shall never think of you again, unless I revisit the vaguely similarly themed Jet Li vehicle Unleashed, or Danny the Dog in some parts of the world, which I recall being a great deal more fun than this.