** (out of ****)
Starring Chow Yun-Fat, Mira Sorvino, Michael Rooker, Kenneth Tsang, Danny Trejo, and Jurgen Prochnow
Directed by Antoine Fuqua & written by Kenneth Sanzel
1998 R
“The Replacement Killers” is ninety minutes of people shooting at each other. That it has no illusions of being anything more than this is admirable. It has no real emotional investment, character development, or plot twists. There is humor, not so much because the characters make jokes as perform impossible stunts. By the end there is the ghost of a romance. But if someone told me that it was ad-libbed on the day of shooting, I’d have no reason to doubt him.
The killers of the title are not actually the heroes, but the assassins sent to kill the hero (Chow Yun-Fat) because he has turned his back on his criminal overlord (Kenneth Tsang). It seems that Chow is tired of assassinating his boss’s enemies and has decided to flee his former employer. In this he is aided by a sexy forgerer (Mira Sorvino) who makes sexy forgeries while wearing sexy lingerie. Together, Chow and Mira do battle with the overlord’s heavily armed minions at various exciting, big-city locations, with lots of broken glass and reloading.
“The Replacement Killers” is an American film in the style of the “Hong Kong action movie,” in which a stone-faced hero with a Beretta 92F in each hand wages war successfully against armies of adversaries. I’ve also heard the subgenre called “Heroic Bloodshed.” The reigning don of these films is director John Woo, who executive produced “The Replacement Killers,” and whose American forays into this genre include “Broken Arrow,” “Face/Off,” and the hilariously absurd “Mission: Impossible 2.” On Woo’s native side of the Pacific, Chow Yun-Fat is his chief shoot-‘em-up avatar in films like “Hard Boiled” and “The Killer.” In “The Replacement Killers,” Chow is both stone-faced and unstoppable, yet vulnerable and even child-like in the way he asks for Sorvino’s help. If you’ve seen “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” you know he’s a real actor. As for Sorvino, who won an Oscar for “Mighty Aphrodite,” she holds her own amidst the action and yells a lot.
This movie is directed, not by Woo, but by Antoine Fuqua, who made the superior Denzel Washington thriller “Training Day” in 2002. In “The Replacement Killers” his visual palette is saturated with deep, intense colors, and his locations, including a temple, a run-down tenement, and numerous Chinatown back alleys, are all gorgeous. He follows Woo’s style of impossibly elegant stunt sequences, which look more like ballet than “Black Hawk Down.” To say the movie is “glossy” would be an understatement. Because it lacks any real substance, style must pull the weight. Every character enters in glass-eyed slow-motion while the soundtrack booms. Every knife has been freshly polished to a cold silver and goes “shink” when it is drawn. Every gun makes a supremely satisfying “chk-chk” when it is reloaded. Every tough guy has a suit that costs more than my rent.
I’d be lying if I said “The Replacement Killers” didn’t squeeze any laughs out of me, but my attention started to wander after a while. Die-hard fans of Fat will get a kick out of watching him smash things. But for the rest of us, “The Replacement Killers” is the kind of movie we stumble across on cable, watch a third of it, and then move on. It doesn’t matter which third, but try to catch the part where Chow explains his three-word masterplan for getting the bad guy: “I’ll need guns.”
Finished September 4, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
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