The Replacement Killers

This action flick was supposed to make two men famous. It was intended to be Chinese idol Chow Yun-fat’s big Hollywood debut and music-video director Antoine Fuqua’s first major feature film. But these big ambitions foundered on a below-average screenplay worthy of a straight-to-video B-movie starring Dolph Lundgren. The well-armed Chow is cool in his black coat and his unwilling partner, the blonde document forger Mira Sorvino, is sexy. But regardless of how spectacularly filmed The Replacement Killers is, it comes across as a bad joke because of its shallowness and the pointlessness of its content. Antoine Fuqua proved his mettle three years later with the excellent crime thriller Training Day and Chow achieved global fame not as an action hero, but as an unhappily in-love spiritual guru and kung-fu teacher in Ang Lee’s poetic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. (12/04/2002)

A simple, extremely stylish piece, a thoroughbred 90's song, reminiscent of John Woo in many ways. First-class imagery, you can't ask for anything else. (31/03/2005)

I don't find this "Hong Kong action movie set in America" nearly as bad as they say. Yes, a drop (or rather a couple of liters) of originality wouldn't have hurt the script, because especially in the first half the whole "boss sends assassins - they fail - boss finds out and sends assassins - they fail..." feels stupid, but because of the constant action, reasonable runtime and nice video clip direction, I didn't get bored and my brain didn't feel particularly abused. (06/10/2012)