Replicas (2019)

Artificial. Unintelligible.

I would like to stop for a minute, and say how thankful I am for the "John Wick" movies. Both have been a pure joy to behold. They should not have worked in any way, but, somehow, they do. The two films are frantic, fun, and made audiences believe that a man would murder an entire room of people to avenge his dog. In short, they are everything that "Replicas" lacks in every respect (especially the dog part).

The story revolves around everyone's favorite Kung-fu knowing dog lover, Keanu Reeves, as a synthetic biologist, who, while on the way to take a well-needed vacation, ends up killing his wife and three kids in a car accident. When he comes to, and finds them all dead, he enlists the help of one of his partners (Thomas Middleditch) to help him clone his family, and pretend nothing ever happened. That, of course, is when everything begins to go terribly wrong (in the plot, and in the execution).

Let me start by saying that I think this concept, in better hands, could have been very intriguing. It seems that the writers had some hang ups about the subject matter, but were too scared to really delve into what they believe are the moral ramifications of cloning and artificial intelligence. It wants to be an episode of "Black Mirror", but never quite finds what it wants to say. This decision leaves the film feeling hollow. Reeves's family only ever feels like a plot point in the film, but never actual characters. Their introductions and deaths are hastily sandwiched in between lengthy scenes of science talk: the opening scene that sees an experiment to transfer human consciousness into an robot body, and the 30-40 minutes of listening to Reeves and Middleditch explain the minutia of cloning. You see, neither man has successfully completed the tasks required to do this, so we have to hear every failing, and every solution in painfully explicit detail.

Not only is the family introduced and dispatched with little thought, but their eventual discovery of the facts also happens at quite a break neck speed. It leaves the audience little to no time to digest what has happened before they are whisked away into a mind boggling third act twist that has no grounding in the first two acts. Things that feel they should be the basis for most of the drama in the feature are shrugged off and forgotten about, because we have car chases and violence to get to!

It was hard to decipher what exactly was to blame for how wooden and stiff everything feels. The dialogue is rough, the acting is deadpan, the editing quick, and the cinematography is flat, and ugly to look at. Nothing in this movie is worth a second glance. The whole ordeal lacks the fun that other Entertainment Studios films (such as "The Hurricane Heist" and "47 Meters Down") seemed to have in droves. They were't good films either, but at least they seemed to realize it, and did everything they could to keep audiences interested. I promise there is nothing of interest here.

Grade: F

Director: Jeffrey Nachmanoff
Writer(s): Chad St. John/ Story: Stephan Hamel
Running Time: 107 min
Rating: PG-13 for thematic material, violence, disturbing images, some nudity and sexual references