Replicas English Movie

Feature Film | 2019
Critics:
Jeffrey Nachmanoff's Replicas attempts to replicate the success of ponderous, cerebral sci-fi classics such as Ex Machina and Blade Runner but it's really hard to be smart when your film is a single-cell organism incapable of thought. Be a good multi-celled one and stay away from this bullet in the brain.
Jan 18, 2019 By Piyush Chopra


"If it could speak, it could feel!", says one character about a failed experiment to transfer human consciousness to a robot. Said experiment had ended with the machine ripping its own face off. The lenient assessment of the experiment's result and the huge leap in logical assumption in the era of Siri and Alexa isn't the only piece of bogus science you'll be treated to in Replicas, a Keanu Reeves sci-fi film so trashy that it bursts through its garbage bag and causes a stink everywhere.


The stink begins with the above experiment. Reeves, a scientist specializing in acting wooden, is in charge of it and spectacularly failing at coming up with a solution to the flaw at the center of his experiment. Then very quickly, his wife and kids are killed in a car accident and he decides to clone them and bring them back to life with his scientific work.


Director Jeffrey Nachmanoff and writer Chad St. John have made a film that, from the very first frame, looks like an impervious rush job. It somehow starts off from the middle rather than the beginning. In fact, there's so much technical jargon spoken out loud to cover for smart dialogues that I stopped paying attention 3 minutes into the film, which might be the quickest a film has ever lost me.


Nachmanoff is so transparent in his manipulations that he doesn't even attempt fleshing out the family members and their importance to Reeves, except in one line of dialogue, before killing them off in an accident to use them as motivation for the man of the story. Then Reeves, the good guy, implicates his friend in various acts of felony by making him help with the experiment without asking him first, then makes him get rid of the useless dead bodies of his family as well. The manipulation then continues when he has to choose one family member to let die to save the others but that plot point lends to several new hokey scientific theories that would make your head spin with their inaccuracy.


All of this make up just the first half of the story. Once the family gets reanimated, the ludicrousness starts free-flowing as increasingly off-track twists get piled on top of previous ones and the film gets progressively harder to concentrate on till it gets to the point where it couldn't be worse. And from that point, there's another 30 minutes more of it left.


Keanu Reeves, also the producer of this mess, looks even less interested in his character than he is in a new Matrix sequel, and he sleepwalks all over the film. He is so wooden, his artificiality is matched only by the terrible CGI robots the film keeps putting through various ordeals such as being in a scene with Keanu Reeves. All of his scenes of external grief over his dead family involve a lot of darkness and him covering his face while sobbing, and that's probably for the best. All you need to know is that in one important moment, he beats another man to unconsciousness with a hard drive.


Jeffrey Nachmanoff's Replicas attempts to replicate the success of ponderous, cerebral sci-fi classics such as Ex Machina and Blade Runner but it's really hard to be smart when your film is a single-cell organism incapable of thought. Be a good multi-celled one and stay away from this bullet in the brain.

Piyush Chopra

   

MOVIE REVIEWS