Keanu Reeves stars as William Foster, a neuroscientist on the verge of transferring human consciousness into a computer when his beloved wife (Alice Eve) and children are tragically killed in a car crash. Desperate to resurrect his family, William recruits a fellow scientist (Thomas Middleditch) to help secretly clone their bodies and create replicas. When William learns that he can only replicate three of the four family members, he makes a decision with fateful consequences.
Keanu Reeves is most certainly one thing: unpredictable. If you look over his varied movie career, you will notice that his choice of roles are so divergent from each other that they hardly ever intersect, unless he is playing a recurring character like Neo from “The Matrix” or Ted Theodore Logan from either of the “Bill & Ted” movies, including next year’s “Bill & Ted Face the Music.”
He has gone from hard-hitting dramas like “River’s Edge,” “Permanent Record,” and “My Own Private Idaho,” to quirky titles such as “The Watcher,” “The Gift,” “A Scanner Darkly,” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” to flat-out blockbusters like “Speed,” “The Matrix” series and the “John Wick” franchise, including next month’s “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum,” which hits theaters May 17th. My point is, the man is not afraid to take chances with his career and I only wish more actors had his fearlessness and audacity.
Now, having said that, the downside to being that courageous is that sometimes, a chosen script that looks good on paper can actually turn out to be a box office bomb and sadly, that has been the case for Mr. Reeves’ past three films, “Destination Wedding,” “Siberia,” and “A Happening of Monumental Proportions.” And now you can add “Replicas” to that list. His upcoming “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum” should help him climb out of that slump and while “Replicas” is a decent sci-fi effort, it falls way short of its intended objective, which is to entertain.
Mr. Reeves plays Will Foster, a biomedical research scientist who works for a company called Bionyne in Puerto Rico. Along with fellow scientist and friend, Ed Whittle (Thomas Middleditch), the two are working on a top-secret experiment where they are trying to transfer the minds of dead soldiers into the body of an android with superhuman strength, called Subject 345. Will’s dream is that it will give families the opportunity to say goodbye to their loved ones whose lives were taken from them. Unable to make a successful transfer, Will’s boss, Jones (John Ortiz), informs him that if he can’t make it work, the company will shut down.
Suffering from so much stress, he decides to take a weekend break and bring his wife Mona (Alice Eve) and their three kids on a boating trip. As darkness falls and a tropical storm envelopes the island, Will finds it increasingly difficult to see the road ahead and in an instant, the car crashes off the road and lands in a stream. Knocked unconscious, when he awakens, he is beyond distraught to learn that his entire family perished in the accident. He calls on Ed to come pick him up and brings their lifeless bodies back to his house. With Bionyne having unsuccessfully cloned animals in the past, he begs Ed to bring the necessary equipment from the lab so he can remove his family’s neural maps and try to clone replacement bodies for them. Ed is against this procedure but against his will, does it for Will.
Will is then faced with the dilemma that there are only three pods and not the four needed for his entire family and he makes the painful decision to sacrifice his youngest daughter, Zoe. As the cloned bodies gradually begin to grow in their pods, Ed informs him that he has exactly 17 days to figure out how to take the neural maps from his wife and remaining two kids and put them into the clones, otherwise, they will all begin to deteriorate rapidly. While trying to cover for his family’s absence from work and school, Will is also faced with the task of figuring out a way to successfully transfer the minds of more dead soldiers brought into the lab into the body of Subject 345. Just as he is about to make the breakthrough, he discovers that his boss Jones actually works for the government and plans on turning Subject 345 into a military weapon. When Jones informs Will that he knows what he did with his family, he tells him that if he can make Subject 345 operational, he will not say a word but Will knows he and his family are just loose ends and in an unexpected move, he interfaces his own mind and brain with Subject 345, making it fully functional and giving Will the upper hand in taking on Jones and his henchmen.
“Replicas” was torn to shreds by the critics upon its initial theatrical release and while I wouldn’t go that far in labeling this movie as truly abhorrent, I can see where a vast majority of them were coming from. Mr. Reeves is not particularly known for his acting, per se, when he stars in a film like “Speed” or “The Matrix” or “John Wick,” they are action vehicles and he excels in these types of movies but when he has to break down and be deeply afflicted, say, at the thought of having just lost his entire family, sadly, his emotional range doesn’t quite hit the mark. But not for want of trying. Some actors are good in certain roles and not in others and unfortunately, Mr. Reeves’ attempts at emotional interpretation come off as awkward and uncomfortable. Thomas Middleditch fares slightly better, proving he has good career prospects outside of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” and his Verizon Wireless commercials but sadly, Alice Eve is reduced to eye candy, strutting around the house in tight sweat pants and given very little in the way of any emotional depth.
Director Jeffrey Nachmanoff, who helmed the excellent “Traitor” starring Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce, here, takes an intriguing concept and manages to turn it into a conventional action thriller, with very little in the way of action or thrills. Here’s hoping his next feature will erase the painful memories of this one and allow us all to wait, with bated breath, for “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum.”
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