KNOCK OFF A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 1998 David N. Butterworth
no stars (out of ****)
Jean-Claude Van Damme movies tend to be, if nothing else, a lot of mindless fun. His latest film, "Knock Off," skips on the fun part leaving a wildly incoherent exercise that is, well, simply mindless.
You can't really blame Van Damme. No one, I suspect, has ever expected "the muscles from Brussels" to contribute a heartfelt performance brimming with introspection and delicate shades of gray. And even his sidekick co-star, "Saturday Night Live" alumnus Rob "makin' copies" Schneider, does what's expected of him, although neither appear to want the role of straight man.
No, the problem with the film is its direction. The first five minutes of the film are incomprehensible ... and it goes downhill from there! Five hundred characters, it seems, are introduced within the first fifteen minutes. Van Damme doesn't land his first kick until after thirty--too late for most action fans--and by the time the hour mark has rolled around, your jaw will be on your cup holder and you'll be wondering why you elected to spend seven dollars on this mess.
Director Hark Tsui, whose previous film was the Van Damme/Dennis Rodman teamed "Double Team," films at such a frenetic pace that it's hard to know what's going on, who's on whose side, and what the point of all this is.
Faster than you can yell "fruit stand!" we're watching a crazed rickshaw race with Schneider being bounced along by an energetic Van Damme. When Schneider starts whacking Van Damme in the behind with a four-foot eel while enthusing "move your beautiful big ass," the movie takes an unprecedented turn to the bizarre.
Every now and again "Knock Off" will deliver some truly ingenious directorial flourishes--inventive camera shots and angles, wild rides down gun silencers and from the tops of buildings to the sprawling street below, revealing cut-ins within the frame--but they all happen too quickly, and within such a furious frame of reference, that they're wasted. If only Hark could have slowed things down just for a minute.
If you're interested in the plot, you're better off reading a capsule review than trying to extract any meaning from the on-screen shenanigans: "Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a shady bluejeans manufacturer who uncovers a Russian Mafia plot to terrorize the world with "nanobombs" hidden in Cabbage Patch knock-offs. Maybe. With Paul Sorvino." A more accurate summary would be "Jean-Claude Van Damme bums around Hong Kong failing to avoid large, blatant Coca-Cola product placements."
The fact that the film is staged during Hong Kong's last days under British rule gets some lip service but doesn't figure in at all.
Perhaps "Knock Off"'s most intriguing credit is that Ron and Russell Mael composed the frenzied music score. Some of you might remember the Mael brothers as the '80s synth pop duo Sparks; their contributions here are as confused as the accompanying action--"Kimono My House" indeed!
Like the cheap jeans and "Pumma" sneakers manufactured in Hong Kong, Van Damme's latest is a real phony.
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@mail.med.upenn.edu
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