Cinemavenger

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Replicas

When the description of your movie begins, "Keanu Reeves is a brilliant scientist," you're fucked for starters.  I like Reeves as an actor, and I've loved some of the movies he's starred in.  He also seems like a genuinely good guy, but Reeves has as much business playing a brilliant scientist as Denise Richards did as Dr. Christmas Jones in The World Is Not Enough.

Reeves' acting style has been called wooden, which is an insult to trees everywhere.  In truth, Reeves' isn't so much wooden as lacking in range.  He's capable of playing any character, from a transsexual, South African pimp to a Japanese geisha girl, in exactly two ways:  kinda stoned and very stoned.

When producers and directors realize that, they reap huge rewards.  Reeves in very stoned mode killed it in the Bill & Ted movies, River's Edge, Point Break, and Bram Stoker's Dracula.  Reeves in kinda stoned mode was just what the weed doctor ordered in Speed, the Matrix movies, and the John Wick flicks.

Pretty much every other Keanu Reeves movie has blown more than your trailer trash mom $500 short on rent, and Replicas is the cyanide cherry on top of that cum-covered sundae.  It's almost like Reeves realized - while he was filming - just how bad this direct-to-video, sci-fi shitacular was going to be.  He even cracks a smile a few times at totally inappropriate moments, and you can tell he doesn't care.  Obviously neither did the director.

Will Foster (Reeves) is trying to transplant human consciousness into robots.  He and his team are so top-of-their-class that they use a super strong, full-bodied robot instead of, I don't know, a laptop or robot brain in a jar.  So, when the experiment fails and the robot freaks out, it can gravely wound some red shirt techs before ripping its own face off.  Brilliant scientist indeed.

While driving like a complete asshole, Foster crashes his car killing his wife and three kids.  He decides to use his research - research that has been a total failure so far - to bring his family back . . . before anyone knows they're dead.  But he's not going to make a robo-family; he's going to transfer their consciousnesses into clones of themselves.  Where and how will he get the clones?  Don't even ask.  All I'll say is Replicas goes from cloning being impossible to, "I'll have your clones for you in three weeks, Mr. Foster," faster than you can say, "Bogus!"

2019.4.19