One thing is perfectly clear about Jean Claude Van Damme’s career–it’s been a long strange ride that’s been mostly downhill for the last twenty years or so. It may have something to do with the fact that he’s been mostly doing the same ROLE for those last twenty years, but one clear difference, one even I have to applaud him for, is Replicant, now available on Blu-Ray thanks to Lions Gate.
Replicant, you see, puts Van Damme in two roles at once, as a serial killer is pursued by police who have a special weapon on their side, a clone of the killer taken from DNA found at one of the crime scenes. Believing that they can recover “genetic memory” from the clone, they begin the long and arduous process of socializing their clone so that he can actually lead them to the killer. And when the killer and the clone end up taking each other on, it remains to be seen whether nature or nurture will win out.
Replicant is a strange sort of animal, caught between freakishly idiotic science fiction and terribly interesting crime drama. The science couldn’t be more wrong–watching the killer wince when his clone was brought online suggested a level of connection that’s never been even posited, let alone proven.
But watching Jean Claude Van Damme hide under a table, and act like everything he saw, he saw for the first time was well worth the price of admission. This may well prove to be the best thing that Van Damme ever did as an actor, because it required him to, for once, ACT. As opposed to his normal modus operandi of punch things and deliver lines.
The Screenhead Ten Scale, therefore, gives some due props to what may be one of Jean Claude Van Damme’s better roles, and gives Replicant a six out of ten. Sure, the science is about as outlandish as is humanly possible, but the action is worth the watching, and there are vastly worse pieces out there.
Popularity: unranked [?]
