Review: Knock-Off

This embarrassing actioner is the worst thing that Belgian spin-kicker Jean Claude Van Damme and Hong Kong director Tsui Hark (the wildly imaginative “Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain” and “Double Team”, a previous Van Damme film of dubious merit) have ever been involved in, and it also proves to be the second dud screenplay the normally reliable Steven E. de Souza (“Commando”, “The Running Man”, “Die Hard”) has written for a Van Damme movie. He was previously the writer-director of the terrible “Street Fighter”, about which the less said, the better. Apparently Van Damme (whose other turkeys include “Derailed”, “Black Eagle”, “The Quest”, and “The Order”) had kicked the drug habit by this stage, but after watching this, I have to question if anyone at all was working sober on this ridiculous, insultingly awful film. Drugs are bad, people. Drugs are very, very bad. I mean, this film finds some truly spectacular ways to be thoroughly dreadful from its opening moment to the very end. It is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen in my 34 years on this Earth. And if you’ve read any of my previous reviews, you know I’ve seen a helluva lot of movies over the years.

 

The film certainly boasts one of the two or three worst premises for an action movie I’ve encountered in my movie-watching life; Van Damme and the seriously miscast Rob Schneider play a couple of  Hong Kong fashion designers (!!) who specialise in jeans of questionable quality (i.e. knock-offs) ready to be sent to the US. It seems someone has interfered with their goods and stuffed in them hi-tech tiny explosives that for some reason result in giant green balls of fire. Yes, green explosions run rampant across this film. Green. Fucking. Explosions. The plot has already descended into psychedelic levels of cinematic ineptitude at this point, but believe me, the wretchedness of this tale doesn’t end there. Lela Rochon (didn’t she used to almost be somebody once?) plays the ball-breaking company investigator who is wise to our supposedly likeable rogue protagonists’ dubious ways and is coming down on them hard (not in the good way, either). Paul Sorvino (!) turns up as a CIA man who is secretly meeting with an undercover agent, who turns out to be one of our two main protagonists (I won’t reveal which). Michael Wong and model Carman Lee play a couple of tough HK cops investigating things (though the latter gets dispensed with jarringly early), and somehow we get the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese worked into the film as a backdrop, though it’s not treated as any more than that. Aside from that it’s all double crosses, triple crosses, bad guys who you thought were good, good guys who you thought were bad, people who are undercover agents, and none of it is particularly coherent. And more pathetic green explosions. The worst CGI-assisted explosions ever.

 

Oh my Lord does this movie consist of seven flavours of suck. After about the fourth or fifth character reveals they aren’t as they appear to be, it has gone beyond tiresome and moved to just plain aggravating. Tsui Hark’s direction is nauseatingly obnoxious, masturbatory stuff that seems like a parody of the sort of style that he made famous in Hong Kong (I really liked “Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain”, which helped inspire John Carpenter to make the brilliant “Big Trouble in Little China”). I don’t want to start any false rumours, but watching this you’d swear the director (who seems like a nice enough guy, from interviews) had snorted the entire supply of cocaine on planet Earth before each day’s shooting. Meanwhile, the post-production dubbing is seriously some of the worst I’ve come across outside of a Jackie Chan movie. Honestly, after I while I became convinced that Wong Jing (who was responsible for Chan’s worst film, “City Hunter”) was the writer-director behind this, until I remembered he’s at least done some good work (“The Seventh Curse”, “The Last Blood”).

 

The direction may be obnoxious and the dubbing terrible, but Schneider manages to be both. Whoever thought it was a good idea to cast this guy in a semi-serious role should be taken out and shot. Schneider is painfully out of his depth here, and he and Van Damme create the worst buddy movie team of all-time (I’m especially hyperbolic today. Deal with it!). Van Damme for his part seems relatively fit, but he’s just not given anything to do action-wise. His few stunts are ruined by slow-mo antics that you’d normally associate with a Steven Seagal film from his ‘post-giving a crap’ period. And once again, I have to say, physically fit or not, he appears to be coked out of his eyeballs the entire time here. I’m just sayin’. Rochon is totally hot and an underrated actress, but there’s no way that she, Schneider and Van Damme belong in the same movie. It’s just a wrong, wrong mixture. Paul Sorvino is an extremely talented actor, and is so much better than this turkey. Did he lose money at the track? Why would he lower himself to this unholy mess?

 

Apparently Michael Wong’s a pretty big deal in HK action, but I found him rather dull, and was much more interested in Carman Lee, who sadly lets Wong do all the work, a wasted opportunity. Apparently the late (and troubled) Leslie Cheung (RIP) has a cameo here as a mechanic, but I never spotted him and won’t bother going back to look for him.

 

The cinematography by Arthur Wong and the HK scenery are terrific, but the film is a turd of epic proportions. Sorry, but it is.

 

Rating: F