Dick Jones is back, nothing goes to waste at OCP, they put in the latest Kawasaki body parts and put him to use as an Ain't It Cool spy unit. Let's face it, as long as Dick Jones runs things, Kuato won't take over, especially with all that help from Houser.. ummm... opps.. did I make a boo boo? HEE HEE HEE... Anyway ol Dick Jones, checked out REPLACEMENT KILLERS and DEEP RISING for us, so enjoy...
Hi, Harry, Dick Jones here again with some random advance looks at stuff...
Caught REPLACEMENT KILLERS the other day, and frankly, this is *not* what I and I'm sure many others were hoping for from Chow Yun-Fat's first American starring role. The biggest problem is that Chow has barely anything resembling a character to play. For the first half, you can almost feel the filmmakers holding back from giving him anything of substance to play, as if they didn't feel his command of English was strong enough. It isn't until the 45-minute mark (and the movie's only about 90 minutes) that he has an honest-to-goodness dialogue-and-characterization scene, and it's one of only about two or three in the whole film. These scenes do demonstrate what makes Chow the coolest, but the rest of what is given him, frankly, could have been performed just as easily by Steven Seagal.
The rest of the movie is not much to speak of. Mira Sorvino is *sorely* miscast as Chow's reluctant sidekick--I wouldn't be surprised if she took this part largely at the urging of her boyfriend Quentin Tarantino; the plot is completely generic; and the villains are colorless and boring (and the includes the replacement killers themselves, who despite their title billing have little to do). The action scenes are certainly flashy, but have a lot more in common with MTV than HK, which is no surprise given that director Antoine Fuqua (oh yeah? well, Fuqua too!) is a music video veteran. As much as I wanted to enjoy seeing Chow break through to the U.S. industry, I couldn't help but be depressed that it's in such an uninspired movie. How could executive producer John Woo have let this happen?
Surprisingly, I enjoyed DEEP RISING quite a bit more. While there's nothing terribly new here, it's been done with energy, humor (which goes too far over the top at times) and fun monster FX. The movie is actually at its best in the first half, setting up the plot (a crew of mercenaries are transported by Treat Williams to a rendezvous with an ocean liner they plan to plunder, only to get a nasty, man-eating surprise when they climb aboard) with a good amount of tension and some amusing macho banter among the cast. Then the monsters show up, and there are some good jumps and suspense scenes, though the film does get repetitive; the surviving characters make their way to another flooded room, the creatures approach, someone says something like, "What the hell now?" and the monsters pounce.
