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Knock Off
Review by Eddie Cockrell
Posted 4 September 1998
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Directed by Tsui Hark Starring
Jean-Claude Van Damme, Rob Schneider,
Lela Rochon, Michael Fitzgerald Wong,
Carmen Lee, and Paul Sorvino
Written by Steven E. de Souza |
Knock Off has much to recommend it, precious
little of which is commercial. Perhaps sensing this, US distributor TriStar ripped a page
from the Warner Bros. playbook and declined to screen the film -- the long holiday
weekend's only major studio release -- for the press. So while it won't be as high profile
a media disaster as The Avengers (Jean-Claude Van
Damme movies aren't, as a rule, hotly anticipated), Knock Off is, ironically, worth
seeing for the astonishing visual imagination and wit of its director, Hong Kong action
veteran Tsui Hark -- who wisely keeps the action moving so fast that his wooden star (who
confessed his on-set cocaine problem last week in a suspiciously timed tell-all interview)
has little chance to embarrass himself in the drama department. Fans of the genre will
thus eat this up, while others are advised to get some sun.
Seventy-two
hours before its handover to the Chinese (a plot point that eventually means nothing
beyond an excuse to show Al Gore and Chris Patton on TV monitors), Hong Kong is the
backdrop for a mysterious incident, as a crate full of dolls submerged in the harbor blow
up and take a number of Russian-speaking divers with it. Meanwhile, V Six Jeans sales
representative Marcus Ray (Van Damme) and his motor-mouthed partner Tommy Hendricks (Rob
Schneider), who have their hands full in the high-pressure world of fashion and the
inevitable counterfeiting endemic to the industry (thus the title), discover an evil plot
to smuggle the newly created nanobombs disguised as denim rivets (!!!) to terrorists
around the world. As they reluctantly join forces with federal agents Karen Leigh (Lela
Rochon) and Harry Johannson (Paul Sorvino) to fight the international conspiracy (and the
inevitable hundreds of flexible henchmen employed to stop them), the two discover that
nobody can be trusted -- not even each other.
The sole reason to see Knock Off is the ever-astonishing eye of director Tsui
Hark, who previously worked with Van Damme on Double Team and thus understands the
strong need for additional visual stimuli. Apparently anticipating audience impatience
with the cookie-cutter script of Steven E. de Souza (48 Hrs., Die Hard),
he's decided to sacrifice predictability -- and, it should be added, coherence -- for flair, offering a
dazzling flurry of interesting and frankly cool visual touches that essentially transform
the film into an art-house action epic (the picture was photographed by Arthur Wong, who
worked with the director on 1993's The Iron Monkey and the seminal 1991 genre film Once
Upon a Time in China). There's the camera shot that plunges through a microchip and
down a telephone line (didn't Kieslowski do something like that in one of the Blue/White/Red
trilogy films?); a brief and puzzling picture-within-picture effect as Van Damme reaches
into a crate; the toe's eye view of a foot going into a counterfeit running shoe (a
"Pumma"!); a couple of 007-ish camera barrel tricks; a shot that goes through a
painting, wall, PC and monitor tube; and, incredibly, a kind of neck cam that shows a guy
getting his throat cut from the inside (blink and you'll miss this one). The more
conventional action set-pieces include some kind of weird rickshaw race through the
streets of Kowloon, a neat if somewhat claustrophobic fight atop a careening truck, Van
Damme's escape from a platoon of bad guys in a labyrinthine fruit warehouse and the final
showdown on a huge cargo vessel with very slick decks (watch for flying containers).
Coupled with the sheer number of camera setups and berserk editing rhythm, the cumulative
effect is vertiginous, surreal and hugely entertaining on a "what-the-hell-was-that?"
level (only some cheap looking visual effects mar the otherwise OK production values).
Van Damme is
like that old geography gag; there's no there there. Equally uncomfortable with drama and
comedy, he no longer holds the screen in this new era of charismatic men of action -- in
fact, he usually looks like somebody just hit him between the eyes with a brick (more so
when he's going for laughs). Schneider does his best with the wisecracking buddy role
(this is a step up from Judge Dredd, anyway), while former Spuds McKenzie dancing
partner Rochon apparently does a couple of her own stunts and brings a certain amount of
hard-ass relish to her role, and Sorvino skates through his rare turn as a heavy. More
distinctive are Michael Fitzgerald Wong ("John Woo's Once a Thief") as
straight-arrow Hong Kong cop Lieutenant Han and veteran actor Glen Chin (an English
dialogue coach for Jackie Chan and Jet Li) as a huge, shady businessman named Skinny.
Breathlessy kinetic trash that succeeds on cinematic chutzpah if nothing else, Knock
Off didn't need Van Damme to be enjoyable -- but would be insufferable without the
gleefully violent pyrotechnics and unmistakable visual style of Tsui Hark. He may not be
commercial yet, but remember the name: where there's Woo, there's a way.
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