REPLICANT (2001)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

If a viewer can get past the utterly boneheaded rationale for REPLICANT, this second collaboration between star Jean-Claude Van Damme and HK director Ringo Lam has a little more emotional nuance than the standard American chopsocky.

Seattle cop Jake Riley (Michael Rooker) is forced to retire before he can catch a serial killer, nicknamed "The Torch" because he targets young mothers and burns them alive. The Torch (one of two roles played by Van Damme) even calls the retired cop at his home and taunts him with Jake's inability to catch him.

Then Jake gets another chance from those helpful folks at the CIA. They have perfected a miraculous cloning technology, which they plan to use in anti-terrorist operations. But since they don't want to mess up any of their own cases, they talk Jake into being the handler for their first guinea pig. The agents have obtained some DNA from the Torch, and they use this data to create a fully-grown "blank slate" version of the killer (the other Van Damme, playing his fourth "double role" in his movie career). It sounds like the resulting Replicant is the first time the CIA boffins have actually carried their experiment to its final conclusion, yet somehow they know their clone will have a psychic link to the wanted man. I guess this link would help the agents use other clones to track down hidden terrorists-- or something. As I said, if a viewer can accept all this folderol the way a kid would accept magic beans in a fairytale, said viewer will be better off.

Though in his home life Jake has a wife and a young son, he doesn't prove to be a very good babysitter for a fully adult copy of the murderer Jake hates with a passion. He's verbally and physically abusive, but the Replicant, not having known anything else, accepts Jake's abuse because Jake also feeds him and teaches him some basic facts of existence. During Replicant's education period, the CIA helpfully provides the clone with videos of gymnasts, and, wonder of wonders, Replicant starts imitating them. The script could have claimed that he was unconsciously emulating the original model, since it will be eventually seen that the Torch is also a super-athlete. But after asking the viewer to believe that the CIA would create a clone of a serial killer for a test run, the bit about the kung fu skills is easy by comparison.

The point of the experiment, to get Replicant to track down Torch, often takes a back seat to Jake's attempts to deal with his charge. The CIA doesn't provide Replicant with so much as an elementary education; he just learns really fast and is eventually able to frame sentences and make elementary connections. In due time, Replicant runs across his original self, and though it takes Torch a while to suss things out, eventually he tries to convert Replicant to his cause, because the two of them are essentially "brothers." 

Will Replicant manage to throw off the influence of the only "father" he's known, and bond with a "brother" he knows to be evil? If one has seen a Van Damme movie before-- or, for that matter, any version of TOTAL RECALL-- it's a given that the "blank slate" self is going to turn out better than the original. The developments of the plot are lively but inconsequential, for they only exist to provide excuses for high-kicking action. The only backstory of any importance is the explanation that the Torch formed his psychosis after his crazy mother almost killed him by burning him alive. This makes for a dodgy parallel between the Torch's history and the treatment of Replicant by Jake, and it doesn't help that Jake's character is too thin to make him anything but a Dirty Harry "clone." Knowing that he's angry at the real killer doesn't really make Jake's treatment of the innocent clone dramatically interesting, even when he does "get religion" about Replicant's essential nobility in the last half hour of the film.

Still, the "blank slate" theme acquires some strong resonance thanks to Van Damme's double performance. The actor is better as the soulful innocent than as the nihilistic misogynist, not least because Replicant gets a lot more scenes. Neither of REPLICANT's two writers, Lawrence Riggins and Les Weldon, have produced a ton of outstanding scripts. Weldon, though, racked up more consequential credits as a producer of big-ticket action movies like the 2011 CONAN THE BARBARIAN  and both the first and fourth entries in the EXPENDABLES franchise.