Replicant (2001)

Replicant arrives in 2001 with a premise that reads like a dare: clone a serial killer from DNA recovered at a crime scene, hand the resulting adult with the mind of a child to a burnt-out Seattle detective, and let the two of them track the original through the Pacific Northwest. Jean-Claude Van Damme plays both the killer and the copy, a dual role he had already attempted twice before, and Ringo Lam directs with the functional efficiency of a man who has staged better chases in Hong Kong. The film went straight to video in the United States. Eleven critics on Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 27 percent approval, which is roughly the enthusiasm level of a Tuesday afternoon screening.

For a film preoccupied with genetic duplication and the question of whether a man is his biology, Replicant has no interest in saying anything about the world. Race never surfaces. Neither does sexuality, gender politics, or the climate. The killer's rage is traced to an abusive mother, which makes the film's women victims and little else, and the script never stops to consider what that pattern might mean. The clone's childlike affect is a science-fiction device about genetic memory, not a portrait of a mind that thinks differently. The shadowy agency that funds the experiment exists to move the plot, and the film never turns its lens on the money behind it. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no moral to carry home. Just a man in a raincoat, a music box, and a lot of running.

This is a vintage of pure 2001 action, decanted without ceremony. It pairs a martial artist in his physical prime with a script that has no agenda beyond the next set piece, and it delivers exactly that. We classify it without hesitation. Zero. A clean zero, the kind that comes along less often than the culture would have us believe. The cellar is full of films straining to mean something. This one just wants to catch a killer.