REPLACEMENT KILLERS (1998)

So, I could tell, in a way, what a strange concept the Replacement Killers was; a cheapy action picture that exploits an action movie star.  For those of you who have never had a conversation with me, The Killer is a John Woo movie that stars Chow Yun-Fat and is one of the greatest films of all time.  HK movie fans who turned to HK movies because they were tired with the formulaic ennui of the Hollywood action movie ended up falling in love with all the great things HK films had to offer.  And one of the greatest is Chow Yun-Fat, who is like Cary Grant and Robert DeNiro but is actually too good to get so easily categorized.  The news that Chow was coming to Hollywood was met with a lot of hope, a lot of trepidation.  As I put it a few years back when alot of the major HK players made their jump to Hollywood, "I actually didn't want Hong Kong moviemakers to save the Hollywood action flick for me; I wanted to them to save me from it."

I expected the Replacement Killers to be an americanized rehash of The Killer; Chow Yun-Fat plays a killer with a heart of gold who has to outgun the bad guys who are gunning for him.  Maybe they give him a cute dog or a kid to protect.  Swell.  It's a HK movie for the common denominator, watered down for the masses.

But then I started seeing some of the footage from the Replacement Killers and some of the publicity stills.  Really, really good-lucking stuff.  Also interesting was the fact that Antoine Fuqua was the director; Fuqua had directed that Dangerous Minds video that was so visually striking they showed footage from the video in the movie's trailer.  And, although I've never got direct confirmation of this, I thought he was the director and star of those strange MTV promo spots from a couple years back where he played Brother Fuqua, the Black Panter comedian.  (His deadpan bodyguards/fellow Panthers flanking him by the microphone always ended the spot by humorlessly chanting, "Ha, ha, ha, Brother Fuqua." which I thought was amusing for whatever reason).  So I thought maybe there would be some originality in it.  And Mira Sorvino was in it, who I've liked ever since Quiz Show.  I had some hopes.

Well, it turns out that Replacement Killers is, in fact, a HK movie for the common denominator, watered down for the masses. It just happens to look very, very good.  I went to the movie and was bored by it, as pretty as it was. Chow Yun-Fat is the killer with the heart of gold; he has to try and get out of the country before the mob boss he betrayed catches him; Mira Sorvino plays the leggy forger who helps him out and kind snarls just about every line in a way that made me think she was trying to spit through a non-existent gap in her teeth.  And Michael Rooker plays the cop who's hunting Chow but suspects that he's more than "just some scumball" (or something equally ironic since Rooker, who played Henry in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer kind of looks like Lucky, the Lucky Charms Leprechaun if Lucky was hooked on smack).  I had originally started this review by saying that they could have cast Chow Yun-Fat as a blind Amish guy who competes at the State Fair with his collection of prize-winning popsicle stick dioramas of the Final Days, and I would have gone and seen the movie and lauded it.  But, in fact, I would have liked the Replacement Killers much more if it indeed had enough faith in Chow to give him anything so daring.  Despite the tidy success that Rumble in the Bronx had with Jackie Chan doing his own dubbing, Chow is probably not even given 80 lines in the entire movie (the scuttlebutt is that they cut a lot out on the set because of how bad his accent was, but it seemed okay when I saw it).  As a result, the movie is probably a better demo reel for bad guy Kenneth Tsang (who I've loved ever since I saw him playing Danny Lee's mentor in, yup, The Killer) who has a pretty good accent and so got to say all of the lines writen for him.  The most compelling argument for the extraordinary depth of Chow Yun-Fat's charisma and ability is that he can actually make you feel what his character is going through (crisis of conscience in that he can't kill a cop's son despite dooming his own family if he doesn't) and makes his way (through a movie that blatantly sells him like soap) with an extraordinary amount of grace.  If Vanilla Ice, Run DMC or Evel Knievel could have done something even remotely similar, they would have gotten another movie under their belt.

 More about this movie

Previous movie

Next movie

Back To Movie Index

Back To Home