Honey, I cloned the family

It can be said that, outside of the Matrix, Keanu Reeves’ forays into the sci-fi genre have all been disastrous, be it the critically panned remake of ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ or commercial flops like ‘Johnny Mnemonic,’ ‘Chain Reaction’ and the rotoscoped ‘A Scanner Darkly.’  Action/adventure has been somewhat gentler to the “wooden” actor, as ‘John Wick,’ ‘Speed’ and ‘Point Break’ were among his better and more successful movies.  It is therefore a bit surprising that his latest effort is the flat and lackluster sci-fi flick ‘Replicas,’ about a man who cloned his wife and oldest daughter after losing them in a car accident during a raging tropical storm.

 

So why did I waste nearly two hours on this Razzie finalist which only managed 10 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and earned a measly $7.6 million on a $30 million budget after two weeks of release and fading fast?  Because I’m an AMC Stubs A-List member and allowed an allotment of three movies a week, that’s why (after finally quitting my MoviePass membership because they suck).  In ‘Replicas,’ Reeves portrays a brilliant research scientist (dude!) working for an ethically dubious biomedical company to transplant the consciousness of deceased soldiers into robotic bodies, presumably to weaponize them.  After losing his family in the aforementioned tragic accident, a despondent Reeves brought them back via cloning (except he could only bring one of his daughters back because he didn’t have enough pods) behind the backs of his overbearing employers, who managed to find out anyway and immediately took action to terminate him and recover “their” property (i.e., his cloned wife and daughter) back.

 

‘Replicas’ is one of those half-baked and ill-conceived movies that may have seemed like a good idea during an alcohol-impaired pitch at a lunch break, but when finally realized you’d slap your head with the heel of your palm and say: “What on earth were we thinking?!”  Better suited for a straight-to-DVD movie or an episode of ‘Twilight Zone’ or ‘The Outer Limits,’ it is simply bad to the point of being a self-parody with little redeeming qualities whatsoever.  It says something about how bad it is when the best acting in the film arguably was from Reeves himself.

Grade: F