I'm rerunning this piece on Replicant, the OTHER movie where Jean-Claude Van Damme Plays Multiple Roles So I Can Focus on Finishing My next book
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When it comes to playing dual roles, Nicolas Cage has nothing on Jean-Claude Van Damme. Sure, Cage may have been nominated for an Academy Award for his masterful performance as two very different brothers in Adaptation, but Van Damme has played dual roles in film after film after film after film.
Those films are, respectively, 1991’s Double Impact, in which he played antithetical identical twins who must team up to avenge the deaths of their parents; 1994’s Timecop, in which he played multiple versions of the same time-traversing law enforcement agency traveling through time; 1996’s Maximum Risk, which again cast him as identical twins; and finally 2001’s Replicant, in which he plays a serial killing arsonist and his genetic clone.
I didn’t even know Replicant existed until I watched Maximum Risk. I was astonished to discover that it was not the final time he played two men who looked exactly the same but behaved much differently.
I was disappointed by Ringo Lam’s Maximum Risk, but Replicant, which he also directed, had a premise so nutty that I had to see it as soon as possible despite recently being extremely let down by the last Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicles I’d seen, in which he played twins.
How could a movie where Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a misogynistic serial killer who works through his fierce hatred of his murderous, abusive mother by murdering single mothers he deems inadequate by murdering them and then setting their corpses on fire, earning him the unimaginative nickname of The Torch AND his man-baby clone not be at least a little awesome?
name a more iconic duo!
Then again, I thought that of Double Impact and Maximum Risk as well, and they both proved to be extremely non-awesome. In fact, they fucking sucked. So, it brings me great joy to announce that Replicant lives up to the transcendent stupidity of its plot and cast.
Van Damme was apparently considered for one of the lead roles in Face/Off alongside Steven Seagal. That obviously did not happen, and while Face/Off is great art and a perfect motion picture and Replicant is entertaining, distinctive trash, it has some of the divine insanity of Woo’s timeless classic.
Like Woo before him, Lam commits to the surreal absurdity of a bonkers science fiction conceit. Lam plays this ridiculous material straight but that’s more fun than the glowering, out-of-place seriousness of Double Impact and Maximum Risk.
#AngrySplits
The wonderfully idiotic premise of Replicant is a deranged mass murderer is on the loose so the feds decide to create a genetic clone of the crazed killer to help them get inside his head and ultimately find and stop him.
What could possibly go wrong with creating an exact duplicate of a monster intent on single-handedly eliminating Seattle’s single mothers? It’s like when you see a movie where they give genetically engineered super-sharks machine guns. It’s just a good idea with no possible downside or danger whatsoever.
Edward "The Torch" Garrotte, AKA Luc Savard (Van Damme), has killed eleven single mothers and set their bodies ablaze in a misogynist rampage. With his greasy black hair, hard-to-trace accent, and unnerving intensity, Van Damme’s Torch suggests Tommy Wiseau playing Norman Bates but with Van Damme action swag.
While I would not use words such as “good” or “convincing” to describe Van Damme’s portrayal of a karate-kicking enemy of Seattle’s unwed mothers, it certainly is one of Van Damme’s weirdest and most uncharacteristic roles. The same is true of the film itself.
Weird and uncharacteristic, if not necessarily good or convincing, also describes Van Damme’s other role, as an impossible figure who is simultaneously an adorable little man-baby seeing the world for the very first time through the innocent eyes of an infant and an exact replica of the sickest motherfucker ever.
It is, as you might imagine, quite an acting challenge to play someone who looks like a thirty-eight-year-old world-class marital artist but has existed in the world for less than a few days and, depending on the needs of a specific scene, either knows almost nothing about our frightening modern world and its unfathomable complexities or knows a great deal.
In a real switcheroo, Van Damme, who generally plays police officers, plays a serial killer, while Michael Rooker, who rose to fame playing a serial killer, plays Det. Jake Riley.
He’s an obsessed cop mere hours away from retirement who uses a television appearance to insult The Torch, taunting, “It turns out that our big bad bogeyman is nothing more than a bed-wetting mama’s boy. That’s right. He pisses himself all the time. Pathetic, really. Just a sick pervert. Is that enough for you?”
That’s exactly the kind of loose cannon you can trust with the single most sophisticated piece of technology in the history of Western civilization. So, after Riley retires from the force, a mysterious organization recruits him to act as The Replicant’s babysitter, trainer, partner, and antagonizer.
The idea is that the more Riley gets under the skin of this newly hatched clone, the more agitated he’ll become, and the more the memories he shares with The Torch will rise to the surface. If that sounds like total bullshit, that’s because it is.
The Torch senses that someone has cloned him before he has the surreal (but somehow not uncommon in the world of Van Damme) experience of encountering a stranger who looks exactly like him.
He is flattered, on some level. If you ask me, ONE crazed serial killer who sets mothers on fire is too much. Yet the powers that be nevertheless created this unholy yet extremely attractive abomination in a weird, seemingly nonsensical attempt to hunt down a killer.
When The Replicant finally meets The Torch, their fighting skills are evenly matched, which makes sense considering that they’re fundamentally the same person, but doesn’t make sense in that the Torch has had thirty-eight years to develop his gifts as a martial artist while The Replicant only had a few days to learn to fight.
Riley is the kind of father figure who teaches his son about the birds and the bees by taking him to a place of prostitution to lose his virginity. The retired cop figures that since The Replicant is several days old, the time has come for him to start having sex.
So the Replicant goes to a red light district and picks up a sex worker despite seemingly having only a vague conception of what sex even entails. After all, he was pretty much born yesterday.
In his confusion, The Replicant throws himself on the sex worker, who fights him off when it becomes clear that he does not have one hundred dollars or any idea what he’s doing.
It sure looks like an attempted sexual assault. Still, when the sex worker ascertains that The Replicant is a virgin, she stops being threatened or put off by his sexual advances and starts seeing them as charming, even inviting him to look her up when he’s looking for a date.
Does the movie end with The Replicant going on that date? You better believe it does. I like to think this weird subplot would be eliminated if the film were made today, as we hopefully now see attempted sexual assault as inherently bad, even if committed by someone hatched in a laboratory out of a giant womb several days earlier.
The Torch reaches The Replicant by playing the whole “We are exactly the same, and you are my brother” angle. The stunted man-child, who is at once total innocent and born guilty, is torn between his exact double and his crusty cop father figure.
As I have hopefully established, Replicant is a weird fucking movie but an unusual, entertaining and enjoyably bonkers one worth seeking out if you’re interested in seeing Van Damme deliver not one but two of the craziest performances in the nuttiest roles of his long and kooky career.
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