Starring: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Rob
Schneider, Lela Rochon, Michael Fitzgerald Wong, Paul Sorvino, Carman Lee,
Wyman Wong, Glenn Chin
Director: Tsui Hark
Action Director: Sammo Hung, Yuen Bun
I caught this at the dollar theater one weekday evening in the fall of '98 on a double bill with Lethal Weapon 4. Imagine that: my fourth Van Damme film in the theaters and my first Jet Li movie ever. My older brother had joined me: he always enjoyed a martial arts movie once in a while. In fact, it was he who taped Kickboxer off HBO back in '91 and got me into the genre in the first place! So, we got two for a buck-seventy-five! My brother dismissed Knock Off as having the "worst photography ever". I had a strange fascination for this movie: I rented it all the time when it came out on video. I don't know why I never bought it back then.
The movie opens with some Russian mobsters trying to salvage a crate from the bottom of Kowloon Bay. They are interrupted by the arrival of the Hong Kong Police, led by Michael Fitzgerald Wong, the Only Chinese Guy in China who Doesn't Speak Chinese. It turns out that the knock-off baby dolls in the crate are filled with "nanobombs" that the Russians detonate before the police can confiscate them.
So switch to the Hong Kong fashion district, where we meet our two leading entrepreneurs: Marcus Ray (Van Damme) and Tommy Hendricks (Rob Schneider). They work for the Hong Kong branch of an international jeans company. Their job is to oversee factory operations, which have been contracted out to a third party. That third party happens to be Eddie Wang (Wyman Wong), a long-time friend of Marcus's with possible Triad connections. Tommy dislikes Eddie, although Marcus treats him like family.
What do the two preceding paragraphs have to do with each other? Well, it's complicated. There's this big rickshaw race that the local merchants participate in for charity. During the race, Eddie is cheating as usual by having lookalikes hidden at strategic places. The Russian mafia shows up and kidnaps the double, thinking it's Eddie. This leads to a fight and shootout at a supermarket between Marcus and the gangsters.
Later, Marcus discovers that Tommy is actually an undercover CIA agent who is investigating both Eddie and one of his clients, Skinny (Glen Chin). Skinny is a distributor of knock-off baby dolls (remember those) and may be in league with the Russians to get his merchandise fitted with the aforementioned nanobombs. Moreover, Eddie Wang may also be in on the plot. Further complications arise when Marcus's and Tommy's company's commercial rep, Karen Lee (Lela Rochon), shows up on their doorstep. She has discovered that the jeans the two are shipping to the States are knock-offs and wants to bust Eddie's factory to see if he's ripping everybody off, or if Marcus and Tommy are also involved in the bamboozle.
Of course, when they lead the raid on the factory (with Michael Wong serving as the police liaison), a truck driven by Russian mobsters bursts from the place like a bat out of a hell. Another fight scene, this one set on a moving vehicle, breaks out. Though some of the mobsters are killed, they get away with the merchandise, which all contains the nanobombs. By this point, Marcus has no choice but to confront Eddie about what's happening. That's where things really start getting screwy and convoluted...
There so many twists and turns, all dressed up with Tsui Hark's over-the-top cinematography and experimental camerawork, that you might have to watch the movie more than once to really figure out what the plot is. There is an evil conspiracy at the heart of it all, but it will definitely be hard to make heads or tails of on a single viewing. In that way, it almost feels like a 90s wuxia epic in modern day action clothing. Thankfully, the movie has a colorful cast and A LOT of action so watching it will most likely NOT be a chore for most viewers.
Van Damme is fine here. He does try to emote when he finds out that his business partner isn't who he claimed to be, and that part is a bit silly. Moreso is the following scene that you occasionally get in 80s HK action films, with the character wandering around Hong Kong with a contemplative look on his/her face. I distinctly remember that same type of scene in Blonde Fury, where Cynthia Rothrock has to "look inward" to "emotional" music after her friend gets mad at her when she finds out Rothrock is a FED.
Rob Schneider is his usual self here. He's not laugh-out-loud funny, but he's at least amusing and injects a lot of energy into his scenes. Lela Rochon is drop-dead gorgeous--she was the hottest member of the Waiting to Exhale cast, which film she's most well known for. She even gets to throw down with Van Damme in one sequence. Look for a Tsui Hark visual tic in her introductory scene where she stands up and the camera jumps back and forth between a tight shot of her face, and Marcus and Tommy, who are looking up as if she were 10 feet tall. The rest of the cast is fine, albeit underused, like Legend of the Wolf's Carman Lee, who plays a policewoman.
Frequent Tsui Hark collaborator Yuen Bun--The Blade; Once Upon a Time in China III and V; Green Snake; The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate--handles the action choreography, with Sammo Hung on second unit directing duties. I'm pretty sure that Sammo directed some of the action sequences of his own while Tsui Hark was directing other scenes. The film is practically non-stop action, so there's plenty to enjoy here: fisticuffs, Hong Kong-style shootouts (Yuen Bun did that sort of thing in films like City War and Blood Stained Tradewind), vehicle chases, and explosions with weird, green CGI flames. The best fights (in the finished version) include Van Damme fighting dozens of Triads armed with choppers at a fruit market and a brief fight with some of Skinny's men in a car garage. The latter is odd because of a shadow visual effect used to make it look like the men are moving at warp speed. It's just strange. I'm of the mind that this movie was something of a dress rehearsal for Time and Tide, much like how Ching Siu-Tung's mediocre Witch from Nepal was him getting ready for the superior A Chinese Ghost Story.
The finale is set on a cargo ship and is mainly about Van Damme slipping and sliding around shipping containers while shooting people. It's stylish, to be sure. He was supposed to have long fights with Jeff Wolfe (Billy from Once Upon a Time in China and America) and Michael Miller (Red Wolf and Bodyguard from Beijing). Those ended up getting cut out so the fights are surprisingly short in the final cut. Shame. Considering the talent involved, they could have been contenders for Van Damme's top fights of his career. Since there are so many set pieces as it is, most viewers will probably not to notice or care too much. There's just too much fun to be had in this over-the-top, incoherent mess of a movie to complain too much about the length of the final fights.
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