Movie review: Replicas

It is one of my favorite movie times of the year: the January dumping ground, where studios offload projects that they don’t know what do with and hope to scrounge up a few bucks from desperate souls tired of awards bait and holiday blockbusters.

It is a perfect place for a film like REPLICAS, which somehow got dropped into 2000+ theaters despite bursting at the seams with laugh-out-loud special effects, incoherent plotting and classic Keanu Reeves ennui. I know we are living in a mini-Keanu renaissance, and I’m all for it, but this is a reminder why Reeves’ career has contained several valleys over the years.

Aside from the January date, this film had trouble written all over it from the start. The smattering of commercials that appeared leading up to its release contained a credit reel that listed the names of 30 producers attached. Thirty producers! 3-0! With that many cooks in the kitchen trying to make chicken salad out of chicken shit, there’s bound to be some issues. That may explain why the film’s first trailer appeared way back in October 2017 – an eternity for a non-Marvel movie.

And then there’s the Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures issue. Props to Byron Allen for evolving from “That’s Incredible” co-host to mini-mogul, but the ES label doesn’t exactly scream quality, from its seemingly fake name to the cheesy fanfare when the title card came up on the screen.

Reeves plays neuroscientist William Foster, who, at the start of the film, is working on a project that attempts to transfer the mind of the recently deceased into synthetic bodies. The initial 10 minutes is filled with hilarious attempts by Reeves and his assistant Ed (Thomas Middleditch) to speak in “scientific” jargon while waving their hands around to do fancy computer stuff. Things get even funnier when the robot they are using, which was apparently created by a special effects team with a 2004 Mac, goes haywire, leading to further awkward acting attempts.

Reeves is confronted with the moral and ethical quandaries of his work at home by his understanding and hot wife Nora (Alice Eve). Last time I checked, neuroscientists aren’t usually married to buxom model types, but maybe things have changed. Anyway, immediately after that conversation, William’s wife and three children are killed in a horrible auto accident that could have easily been prevented in several different ways.

After spending more time neatly arranging the bodies of his family than actually grieving, William decides to use his tech to create clones of his loved ones, dragging in poor Ed for this unbelievably insensitive and highly illegal scheme. William even makes Ed dispose of the bodies! C’mon, man, that ain’t cool at all.

Since it takes 17 days for the replicas to come out of their pods, we get to see a lot of shots of status bars slowly filling up and William making poor excuses for the sudden disappearance of his wife and kids. Oh yeah, since there are only three cloning pods, he decides that his youngest daughter is SOL and erases all traces of her being. (Couldn’t he have just re-used a pod later for that?)

Of course, bringing back people from the dead never goes well, but aside from a few personality quirks and bad dreams, nothing that horrible happens to the newly replicated Fosters. In fact, when Eve comes out of the pod, she’s impeccably made up, with not a hair out of place and her arms perfectly positioned to keep that PG-13 rating. No, the drama comes from William’s boss Jones (John Ortiz) realizing what his employee has done and wanting to use the tech for his company’s nefarious purposes.

Did I mention this movie is set in Puerto Rico? There doesn’t seem to be any discernible reason for that other than the aforementioned 30 producers surely received a tax break for filming there. Will and his family go on the run, but are quickly captured thanks to a bit of duplicity you can see from a mile away, forcing him to use his tech to create another (surprise) replica to save the day.

A movie with this premise could dig into all sorts of interesting theories, but writer Chad St. John and director Jeffrey Nachmanoff seem content with skimming the surface and trying to gotcha! us with a ending that only works if you haven’t seen the Ryan Reynolds dud “Self/Less” before.

Reeves is on auto-pilot for most of the movie, letting his stubble do the work. Several times, people mention how bad William looks in the aftermath of the unknown accident, but to be honest, he looks exactly the same as he did in the opening scenes, when he’s allegedly at his best. Middleditch actually comes out of this as the most developed character, asking the kind of questions all of us would in this kind of situation.

Make no mistake, “Replicas” is a bad movie. But there’s enough unintentional humor and sci-fil gobbledegook that, when it begins its inevitable run on TNT, you can stop and watch without feeling too much shame.

~ by Elliott on January 15, 2019.