| The Replacement Killers | | Cast : | Yun-Fat Chow, Mira Sorvino | | Director : | Antoine Fuqua | | Studio : | Columbia/Tristar Studios | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen | | Released Date : | February 06, 1998 | | DVD Released Date : | March 06, 2001 | | Language : | French (Subtitled), Spanish (Dubbed), English (Original Language), French (Original Language), English (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | August 08, 2005 | | Summary | Oh Yeah! Chow Yun Fat! | Content
 | I loved this movie...I know, I know, chinese cliche martial art exploitation film BUT...
John Lee is deliberate in every word and movement. He doesn't say much and it works. It makes him all the more serious and sinister. Next, if you notice carefully, he dresses entirely in grays, blacks and dark neutral tones. It makes him stand out against the world of color in the background, especially in the Chinatown scenes which are explosive with color. Best of all, I was sucked in by the killer with a heart, not just an unstoppable murder machine.
Mira Sorvino is great as the tall, beautiful and ALL tough girl, Meg Coburn. She means business and doesn't take any bull*#@% even when there's a gun pointed at her. ..loved her comment about "we'll have this conversation again".
Finally, what greater villain's lair than the exquisite Hollyhock House by Frank Lloyd Wright. I love the few scenes that show it and strain to get a better look.
I'm know I'm glossing over some other great parts of the movie, but these are the things that truly stand out to me.
All said, I LOVE this movie. Something about it is exciting to me. If it's not your thing, so be it, but it is worth seeing.
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| Rating | | | Date | June 28, 2005 | | Summary | Cliched But Well-Made | Content
| "The Replacement Killers" was apparently Chow Yun Fat's debut in western movies, adding to his already formidable career in the Asian movie industry. Chow Yun Fat, Mira Sorvino, Jurgen Prochnow, Michael Rooker and others working with John Woo have created a reasonably slick actioner that is full of some pretty obvious cliches.
John Lee (Fat) is a hitman forced to work for crime boss Terence Wei, (Kenneth Tsang). After Detective Zedkov, (Rooker), kills Wei's son, Lee gets assigned the job of revenge. It is a job Lee can't do. Lee goes on the run to save his family, who are back in China, with Wei's men and the cops after him. Meg Coburn (Sorvino) gets dragged into it, and they both team up for the adventurous ride of violence.
The action, which consists of some very intense gun fights, is done in the typically choreographed John Woo style. Of course, the scenes are totally unrealistic, and they are dramatised to the hilt. However, they have a certain artistic style, and the overall feel is quite fluid. With these scenes, John Woo is really in his element.
Some of the characters are very much the cliched stereotype almost straight from B-grade flicks of the 1970's and early 1980's. Two professional asssassins, (played by Til Schweiger and Danny Trejo), are certainly in this category. Dressed in all black, with loads of leather, and not a facial twitch between them, their roles are over-the-top, stereotypical bad guys. Even the photography and music in their scenes can emphasise this.
Mira Sorvino provides the eye-candy and the female tension as counterpart to John Lee. While not essential to the film's plot, she does add something more to the overall cliched feel of the movie. Not to mention, she is very beautiful, as well. While not Sorvino's greatest moment of acting, she was certainly one of the better actors in this movie.
This movie is quite good as far as it goes. Don't expect too much from it, and you will certainly enjoy it. Just sit back and enjoy the action, and even have a giggle at the bad guys in their cliched toughness.
By the way, you will probably notice that "cliche" gets used a lot in this review. That one word really sums this movie up well. |
| Rating | | | Date | June 18, 2005 | | Summary | assassins | Content
| This movie made Chow Yun Fat a star in America. Was supose to kill a cop cause cop kill a chinese man's son but only in defense. Two deadly assassins were sent to kill Chow Yun Fat's character (John) one of them were shooting bullets out of his suit case how cool is that. John wants to go back to his family in china before they get killed. The action is fast in this movie. |
| Rating | | | Date | June 16, 2005 | | Summary | It works, if you like formulaic garbage | Content
| "On Demand", the service offered by many cable and satellite providers, is proving its worth. It's getting me to watch movies I would never have watched before.
This is one of those films that every starving altruistic screenwriter wishes he could write, but wouldn't dare because he values art above all else - even money. I would imagine that the writer was handed the plot by someone at Columbia, saying, "We need an action film involving a Chinese mob, a renegade hit man, a pretty girl, and a `hit' that makes the hit man go straight".
How much more formulaic can you get?
It sticks to the formula, for better or worse. Assassin encounters moral conundrum and can't kill target. Mob orders hit on assassin. Assassin goes to beautiful girl for help. Beautiful girl helps him in shoot-outs that she couldn't possibly have survived in a real-life scenario. Yada-yada. You can guess the rest. There's no question who will be the victor, and who will be spoiled.
The saddest part was that Mira Sorvino's tremendous talents are - once again - wasted.
Speaking of wasted, I won't waste more words. In addition, don't waste your time on this. I'm glad that I didn't pay for it.
I am utterly astonished that ANY reviewer gave this five stars, or that it inspired another reviewer to write, "Gun Fu ballet at its finest". What the "H"? As I said, this is nothing more than a formulaic film made to - it hopes - appeal to those who enjoy movies about the Chinese mob. When you look at the films gross receipts, and its budget, you be the judge - it failed. It cost $30m to make, and grossed $35m worldwide. That's considered a monumental failure.
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| Rating | | | Date | May 21, 2005 | | Summary | Gun Fu ballet at its finest | Content
| I didn't expect much from this movie. I enjoyed Chow-Yun Fat in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon but wasn't all that familiar with his other work. I expected a movie more in the vein of Jet Li's films... which is to say, not very good but with excellent martial arts acrobatics.
Fat's not really the martial arts kind of guy, though. He's a Gun Fu type, capable of firing two pistols while sailing through the air. And in this film, he's John Lee, an expert assassin who balks at retaliating against a cop, Stan Zedkov (Michael Rooker).
The plot is interesting: John performed two other successful assassination attempts, but he has a mother and sister who will die if he doesn't complete the third. When he realizes the third job requires him to kill Zedkov's son, he disobeys the crime boss' (Terence Wei, played by Kenneth Tsang) orders. The only way John's family will survive is if he kills Wei before the crime boss gives the order.
So suddenly, the bad guy becomes the good guy. The director (Antoine Fuqua) wisely realized that watching Fat shoot people gets boring after awhile. So he cast Mira Sorvino as Meg Coburn, an expert forger who creates passports. John gets embroiled with Meg when Wei's thugs show up at her apartment to kill them both.
Sorvino's character is a curiosity as much as she is a sidekick. She can have her kneecap busted and recover in minutes. She can cap a bad guy with a perfect headshot. And yet she can't seem to actually wear any clothes correctly. Her dresses are always partially zipped up or unbuttoned. I'm not complaining, mind you. It's just that Meg comes off more as a walking distraction as opposed to a character that's integral to the plot.
There's some implication that a romance might be burgeoning between the white girl and the Asian guy, but the film doesn't have the guts to go there (shades of Romeo Must Die). The most we get is a hug and a stroke of the cheek.
The rest of the film is people shooting other people. About midway through the movie, Wei hires the bad guys that give the film its moniker: replacement killers. These killers (Til Schweiger and Danny Trejo) are supposed to be really mean and nasty, but their only distinguishing character is that they have more powerful weapons than everybody else. And dress better.
These days, it's difficult to show that a character is an expert killer with firearms. It's one thing to throw a knife and skewer someone at 50 paces in the throat. It's another to pull off a successful headshot in a film when everybody, including the cute chick, kills everybody else with one shot. Danny Trejo in Desperado was a scary bounty hunter with mad knife throwing skillz; Danny Trejo in Replacement Killers is just a guy with a big rifle.
What makes the movie worth watching is Fuqua's direction. He knows what he's doing and he does it well. Music is well timed and appropriate (scored by Harry Gregson Williams), even during an exchange of gunfire. There are inventive and acrobatic shots of Fat diving, rolling, shooting, and sliding. If it weren't so spattered with blood, the choreography might be considered beautiful.
Replacement Killers makes no excuses for what it is. That doesn't make it a great film either. But I enjoyed it for what it was: Gun Fu ballet at its finest. |
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