Knock Off Review
by Jamie Peck (jpeck1 AT gl DOT umbc DOT edu)November 4th, 1998
KNOCK OFF
Reviewed by Jamie Peck
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Rating: no stars (out of ****)
TriStar / 1:30 / 1998 / R (language, violence, brief nudity, general badness)
Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme; Rob Schneider; Lela Rochon; Paul Sorvino; Carmen Lee; Wyman Wong
Director: Tsui Hark
Screenplay: Steven E. de Souza
------------------------------------------------------------------------ There are bad movies. There are _bad_ movies. And then there's "Knock Off," an appropriately-titled vehicle for Jean-Claude Van Damme that just transcends badness altogether. Granted, Van Damme's films are fairly easy targets when it comes time for a critical analysis, but this stinker sinks the buff Belgian kickboxer to a deadly new low. At least some of his most recent work boasted scattershot positive attributes — 1994's "TimeCop" (arguably his best) had an interesting story, 1996's "Maximum Risk" looked fantastic and last year's "Double Team" was an unintentional gutbuster. Knock Off, on the other hand, claims none of these "qualities," not even the inadvertent laugh track. You could strain yourself into a hernia looking for a sole good thing here.
The backdrop is 1997 Hong Kong, right around the time the country's British rule was handed over to China. Van Damme plays Marcus Ray, a swarthy designer jeans rep (aren't you just loving this already?) with connections to the counterfeit underground, a market that's being retooled by an international smuggling ring — they're installing tiny "nanobombs" in the front waist buttons! (Please hold all jokes about exploding crotches.) Covert CIA agents, turncoat sales executives, former KGB thugs and the Russian mafia all somehow figure into "Knock Off" as well, but the plot is best described as incomprehensible, annoying sound and fury. In fact, if not for the generously wordy production notes, a summary of the film's set-up would be downright impossible.
Director Tsui Hark, who previously worked with Van Damme on "Double Team," fills "Knock Off" with visual gimmicks that serve only as empty distractions. Like a watered-down version of this summer's "Snake Eyes," the camera knows no boundaries, traveling through newspapers, telephone lines, computers and rifle scopes as if they weren't solid objects; one weird shot appears to wander inside a shoe and emerge from a pool table pocket. Completely unacceptable action sequences only add to the maddening confusion, especially a horrible boat chase that opens the film on two left feet. "Knock Off" employs slow-motion, fast-forwards and freeze-frames to give its various battles and fight scenes an outlandish energy, but all of this flashy excess is completely unsynchronized.
"Knock Off" wouldn't have been so painful to sit through had it at least been diverting in the way that only terrible movies can be, but no such luck. It's a straight-faced disaster, unbearably squandering a potentially juicy filmmaking style and wasting a fine supporting cast (Rob Schneider, Lela Rochon and Paul Sorvino), generally making its 90-minute running time feel like an eternity. Perhaps "Knock Off" reaches its intolerably absurdist zenith not long after it starts, when, for no discernable reason, Van Damme carts sidekick Schneider around the crowded streets of Hong Kong in a rickshaw race. The latter grabs an eel from a nearby food stand and begins pelting the former with it, screaming, "Move that big, beautiful ass of yours!" If you know what's good for you, you'll do the same.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ © 1998 Jamie Peck
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Visit The Reel Deal Online: http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~jpeck1/ "The best possible argument for including [a shot of Bruce] Willis' genitals would have been that the movie, after all, contains everything else." —Roger Ebert on "Color of Night"
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