“REPLICAS” — 2 stars — Keanu Reeves, Alice Eve, John Ortiz, Thomas Middleditch; PG-13 (thematic material, violence, disturbing images, some nudity and sexual references); in general release
“Replicas” has way too many obvious flaws to give it a full endorsement, but for B-movie sci-fi fans, it’s still pretty fun — in a guilty pleasure kind of way.
Jeffrey Nachmanoff’s film follows a scientist named Will who clones his family after they are killed in a car crash. Well, most of his family, anyway. More on that later …
Will (Keanu Reeves) lives with his family in Puerto Rico, where he works for a cutting-edge company called Bionyne Industries. Will and his team are trying to perfect a process whereby the brain from a dead body is effectively downloaded and installed into a synthetic android. It’s a sketchy business, which is probably why the research is happening in Puerto Rico with military cadavers instead of on the U.S. mainland.
Things haven’t been going so well, and Will’s boss (John Ortiz) makes it clear that time is running out on the project. But Will’s motivation jumps several notches when, on the way to a family getaway, his wife Mona (Alice Eve) and their three children are killed in a tragic crash.
Will’s work has led him to believe human consciousness is little more than electrical impulses and neural pathways, so in the immediate aftermath of the crash, he downloads Mona and the kids’ brains, then has his assistant Ed (Thomas Middleditch) steal some equipment from the lab so he can create a cloning lab in his basement.
Ready for the kicker? Ed can only find three cloning pods, so Will suddenly has to decide which of his three kids doesn’t get to come back. And things just get worse from there.
It’s a pretty bonkers concept at a distance, and even more zany to watch in real time since like Will, “Replicas” has a way of skipping over the moral quandaries of its story and focusing on the mechanics of the problem solving. The result is a film that is clearly bad, but still fun to watch.
You could get lost in the plot holes, like how a multimillion dollar project requiring a top-secret lab and a full staff of technicians can suddenly be replicated in an unfinished basement. Or how the entire cloning option comes out of nowhere, since before the crash, the project had been exclusively focused on putting a dead soldier’s marbles in a robot. With “Replicas,” you just kind of have to kick back and enjoy the ride to Crazy Town.
Of course, all of this is setup for what happens after the project is successful, and Will has to attempt to return to real life with 75 percent of his original family. But I won’t spoil any more of that here.
“Replicas’” flaws root it firmly in $5 Tuesday guilty pleasure territory, but you get the feeling that going in a couple of other directions might have elevated this one to legitimately good status. Say for example, if Nachmanoff had leaned hard into the crazy nature of his source material and made Will more of a cuckoo mad scientist. (As it stands, Reeves turns in a more mechanical performance, which makes the film’s ending brazenly poetic.)
Or, even better, “Replicas” could have amped up its tension by playing from Mona’s point of view as she slowly realizes she is a clone (though admittedly, this already happened in another relatively recent science-fiction film that shall remain nameless).
At any rate, the real bummer with “Replicas” is they spent too much time trying to explain how things were happening, when they should have just run with the film’s inherent madness and put on more of a show. It can be very difficult to walk the line between thoughtful and camp, and “Replicas” is a prime example of that challenge.
Rating explained: “Replicas” draws a PG-13 rating from intermittent profanity and some violent content, as well as some implied nudity (when a body is removed from a clone pod).