Replicas (2020) - Movie Review

After having quite the phenomenal year in 2019 (not to mention knocking it out of the park more recently with Bill & Ted Face The Music), I was honestly willing to give B-movie Keanu Reeves an honest chance. Hell, the plot for this one really intrigued my itch for sci-fi philosophising, all about the ethics of cloning and transferring a human consciousness into another body. Then I discovered that this is written by Chad St. John, who also gave us the jingoistic claptrap of London Has Fallen and the entitled tedium of Peppermint. Then I found out the director, Jeffrey Nachmanoff, is better known for writing the glorified business expense of The Tourist, as well as Roland Emmerich’s woefully unhelpful take on global warming with The Day After Tomorrow. Can’t win them all, I guess.

Despite (mostly) staying away from St. John’s more action-thriller wheelhouse, his characterisation of the lead character, neuroscientist William, is aggravatingly similar. He has a very specific mode when it comes to writing genre heroes, where the pain that they themselves go through matters more than anyone else’s. No matter how much pain they choose to inflict in turn to assuage their own, it’s all justified. And here, that manifests in what the film proffers as its first main moral dilemma: William choosing to bring back his family, who all died in a car accident, as biological clones.

Ignoring how wonky the film’s understanding of the mind-body problem turns out to be, or just understanding human consciousness on its own (“If it could speak, then it could feel” might be one of the most irritatingly reductive takes on this idea I’ve ever come across), the film’s framing is entirely off-balance. If it was set up like a sci-fi-tinged mystery, from the point of view of the family themselves feeling that something is wrong but they’re not sure exactly what, the attempts at drama could’ve resulted in some genuine moral greyness.

Instead, as we stay fixed to William’s perspective for the entirety, the whole matter brushes off way too many of the moral and ethical implications of the plot in favour of that entitlement I mentioned before. It admittedly does well in making the audience feel the pain that the lead is going through, much like Peppermint did, and Keanu even manages to do well at selling the anguish he’s under. But when it comes down to a mangled Sophie’s Choice in which 3 of his 4 family members he will revive (which he decides by literally pulling names out of a hat), it drops the ball in showing the reaction to that pain.

That disconnect between the intent and the delivery is a major problem with the film as a whole, as the tone is quite self-serious and morality-driven, and yet the pacing is almost slapstick in how much it hinges on keeping conspicuously-fragile secrets from people, namely to do with the cloning process. This partly manifests through William’s research assistant Ed (played decently by Thomas Middleditch), who is basically the de facto comic relief in a film that really didn’t need as much of it as he delivers, but the plot is littered with it as well. When we get to the scene where Keanu is masquerading as his family on social media to explain their suspicious absence since the car crash, it really drives home how much this is meant to appeal to his own interests, rather than those of his family.

There’s also a serious case of bad kitchen sink sci-fi here. Even though there is more than enough stuck to the main cloning premise to fill out a film on its own, St. John seemingly can’t help but add even more shit to the pile, including the idea of something cloning themselves into a robot body, body dysmorphia to do with said transfer, not to mention the finale that devolves into standard action-thriller trappings that render any and all ethical musings beforehand moot. Rather than cultivating a select few ideas, they made an all-too-familiar mistake and just piled on the concepts without really fleshing them out. And that’s without getting into the I, Robot-ass effects work on the robot bodies, which even for a B-movie are astoundingly subpar.

This is an absolute mess, and it might have rubbed me the wrong way even more so than either London Has Fallen or Peppermint. It proffers a similar unpleasantness in how much the film bends over backwards to justify the lead’s (at best) morally-ambiguous actions, but when put in conjunction with what we see as the family’s own reactions to that, it feels like they tried a little too hard to brush off what should be highly complicated ideas. It’s simplistic to the point of making this entire exercise feel pointless and unnecessary.