Replicas review: Keanu has made good sci-fi with The Matrix, bad with Johnny Mnemonic, and now comes the ugly…
Lionsgate UK
In Replicas, brilliant scientist Will Foster (Keanu Reeves) is on the brink of imprinting the human mind into a synthetic body. He also has the perfect family, a beautiful doctor wife Mona (Alice Eve), and three beautiful children. After a tragic accident, of which Will is the sole survivor, he takes the rather drastic decision to bring his family back to life, but has he made a terrible mistake?
After the drought that was most of the noughties, it has been fantastic seeing Keanu Reeves in great movies again. Sadly, aside from John Wick, The Neon Demon and The Bad Batch, most of them are poorly realised; Replicas is the latest such offender. Its main offence is that it’s a film that has been seen many times before. Reeves also fully regresses to another of his sci-fi movies Johnny Mnemonic, utilising the same hand movements and mannerisms when wearing the headset. Sadly there’s no Jesus-loving Dolph Lundgren or mind-reading dolphins to bring the fun factor. Instead, we get almost two hours, easily half an hour too much, of confusing events and baffling science speak, which appears to just be random science words strung together.
The story is riddled with plot holes, logic leaps, and rather confusing sudden shifts in narrative direction. For example, despite the film having focused on robots for the first chunk of the film, suddenly Will’s assistant Ed (Thomas Middleditch) is identified as being capable of human cloning. Then there’s the fact that Will tries to mask his family’s absence by pretending to be them via their personal electronic devices, but doesn’t think that anyone might mention any of these exchanges to his family members when they awake. The biggest bad move though is when, after not being able to bring all four family members back, he wipes all memories of that person from their minds. That might work for them, but what about everyone else that knows them?! It’s also randomly set around Christmas for no reason whatsoever. This muddled mess is more than a little infuriating, and be warned, if you pay too much attention you’re likely to develop one heck of a headache from all the inconsistencies.
As always Reeves is as charming, but he, like the viewer, seems lost for the majority of the run-time. At times it feels like it’s one big improv show, with random people calling out words that change the established narrative, and Reeves seems understandably bewildered. He also brings back the disastrous Knock Knock level of cringe inducing interaction with some of the younger cast members. Thankfully the ‘cake monster’ doesn’t make a return, but the same voice is used to announce the ‘fun town ferry’.
Hugely inconsistent, Replicas struggles under the weight of it’s indecisive story and outdated CGI.
Replicas is available on Digital HD, DVD and Blu-ray from Monday 29th April 2019.
