The Replacement Killers Review
by Ben Combee (combee AT techwood DOT org)February 16th, 1998
THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS
a film by Antoine Fuqua
a review by Ben Combee
After a few hours of moving furniture, the urge to do something else took over, so my friend and I went to the matinee of _The Replacement Killers_, the latest Hong Kong action film to be shot in the US.
Now, semanticians out there will quibble with my last statement... if it was shot in the US, how can it be a Hong Kong film? Well, you see that many of the internationally acclaimed directors, writers, and actors of HK's booming film business left that country for the US in the last couple of years before HK went back to China. So, a film effectively done under the same people with the same actors here is still, effectively, a HK film.
_The Replacement Killers_ (TRK for short) is definitely effective.
I left the theatre thinking that TRK was "John Woo"-lite. There is much to be said for that argument -- the film was executive produced by Woo and many of the action scenes directly quote Woo's earlier work. If you're into John Woo drinking games, you'd be drunk by the end of this movie. What the film in missing, however, is a story. The plot is there, but its really just a metal clothes-hanger upon which an mobile of stupendous gun fight scenes can be hung. Chow Yun-Fat (star of Woo's _The Killer_) plays a hit-man, John Lee, with obligations to Mr. Wei, a Chinese mob boss. After a cop kills Wei's son, Lee is sent on a mission against the cop. His ethics get in the way, so he tried to flee town with the help of Mira Sorvino's Meg, a designer of fake IDs. The two of them become partners in a campaign to take down Mr. Wei after spending most of a day dodging Wei's goons.
The effectiveness of the movie isn't in its poetry or its emotion. Leave that to Woo. This movie is ninety minutes of stylized gunfights, and they are done quite well. You won't see the amazing physical feats of a Jackie Chan movie, but you will see lightning fast reflexes and great choreography. Mira even does a great job in her first big action role. There is no ounce of helplessness in her character, just big-hearted toughness.
In conclusion, this is a very effective pastiche of Hong Kong's stylized violence. It's not filmmaking on the level of the best of HK, but it fills the gap until we get to see the next Woo film. On my [-4, +4] scale, it gets a solid +2.
P.S. One final bit of trivia... what does TRK have in common with Egoyan's _The Sweet Hereafter_? A scene in an automatic carwash.
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Benjamin L. Combee ([email protected]) <URL:http://yak.net/combee/> Signatures are the bumper stickers of the information superhighway.
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