Replicant (2001) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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No more negative talk. From here on, this film is known as Repli-Can!

Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Replicant is a solid action film with a touch of science-fiction that drives the plot. It provides a fun experience, but replicates much of its elements from other stories.

First Impressions

The trailer shows that Jean-Claude Van Damme is playing a killer. In order for the police to catch this ruthless menace, they end up cloning him to create a copy of the killer that will remember the things he’s done. As expected the two JCVDs fight each other in an exact mirror way, canceling out each other’s strikes. He’s a Replicant! It’s like a sci-fi version of Double Impact.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

A killer known as The Torch (Jean-Claude Van Damme) murders a young mother and sets her body on fire, leaving an infant son in the crib. Moments later, police detective Jake Riley (Michael Rooker) arrives, saving the infant and pursues The Torch. Unfortunately, the killer gets away. Jake is approached immediately by Stan Reisman (Ian Robison), a Federal agent, offering him a job, due to Jake’s upcoming retirement. Jake gets a call the next day at his retirement party, taunted by The Torch. He then decides to see what the Feds have to offer.

Reisman is part of the National Security Force, who shows Jake a replicant of The Torch that they have been growing thanks to some hair samples found one year ago. Referred to as only Replicant (also Jean-Claude Van Damme), no ‘the’, this clone is an exact copy of the adult version of the killer. He has had his telepathic ability “enhanced through genome re-sequencing,” and the Feds hope he can be used with Jake’s help to track down the real killer. Jake is afraid that they’ve just grown another killer.

Replicant is strong and physically fit, but also simple, like a child. He doesn’t understand what is going on. Jake is very abusive to Replicant, taking him to places where the real killer committed his crimes and then getting angry at him. Replicant gets some mental flashes from the locations, but doesn’t comprehend the images. Jake takes Replicant to his house, where he lives with his partner Angie (Catherine Dent) and his step-son Danny (Brandon James Olson), and locks him in the basement. Jake is quick to anger with anything relating to Replicant.

Using the computers at the police headquarters, Jake–now knowing what the Killer looks like–uses a photo of Replicant to search for the killer. He finds the killer is Edward Garrotte and gets an address. Jake, Angie, and their Captain (Paul McGillion) check out the location and barely miss getting blown up in a trap. Replicant escapes Jake’s custody and finds Garrotte in a bar where the two fight. Replicant wants to know who they are, but Garrotte leaves without answering. Lost and unsure of himself, Replicant wanders the streets, finding a Hooker (Marnie Alton), and beating up her bodyguards. She tells him to come find her later, wink wink.

Jake finds Replicant and starts treating him a bit nicer, after some words from his mother (Pam Hyatt) about not treating the clone like a criminal. Garrotte visits an elderly woman (Margaret Ryan) in a hospital, which turns out to be his abusive mother. Flashbacks show that as a child he was often told he was a bad boy, and his mother tried to burn down their house. Garrotte kills his mother. Jake and Replicant show up soon after, due to the clone getting some telepathic flashes. Garrotte surprises them and tells Replicant to kill Jake, but he refuses.

During a fight in the parking garage and incinerator area of the hospital, Replicant saves Jake from being killed. Replicant and Garrotte then fight, with Replicant knowing all the killer’s moves, canceling out the kicks and punches. Jake shoots Garrotte and reminds Replicant that the killer is not family, even though they look alike. Replicant helps Jake to safety before an explosion apparently kills the clone. On a rainy day sometime later, Jake sees Replicant put a music box in his mailbox, a memento of Garrotte’s childhood. Replicant then finds the Hooker (as she had asked him to) and they go off to start a life together.

“You’re a bad mother.” – Edward Garrotte, The Torch

History in the Making

Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Replicant was released a little under a year after the release of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s own film about cloning, The 6th Day. Both feature the action heroes in dual roles. Yet, while Schwarzenegger’s film is more of a straight forward action-flick, Van Damme’s movie provides a little more food for thought–even if they both have ludicrous premises. Both film’s also feature Michael Rooker. He plays an antagonist in The 6th Day but a heroic character in this film.

Replicant had a limited release in some European countries, but was released direct to DVD in the United States, something that is always seen as the mark of a lesser film. And while this movie is not on par with a lot of other action films from the era (or even earlier Van Damme films), it’s not the worst film by far. It provides everything that a person wishing to see a Van Damme film might expect: action, Van Damme’s signature moves, and a little bit of emotional connection with his character, however tenuous.

This was not Van Damme’s first science-fiction film. That honor goes to the forgettable 1989 action film Cyborg which put JCVD in the role, not of a cyborg, but of a mercenary hired to protect a cyborg. He followed that with Universal Soldier, which did sort of make him a cyborg and teamed him up with Dolph Lundgren. This was also not the first time JCVD had played multiple roles in a film. In fact this was the fourth (out of five) time he was credited in a multiple appearance. Double Impact (1991), Timecop (1994), and Maximum Risk (1996) were the previous films with The Order (2002) being the most recent one. While it might seem like an interesting idea to cast Van Damme as both the protagonist and the antagonist, the limited fight scenes of them together were not as exciting as they could have been. These scenes were mostly achieved through editing, with the final fight in the hospital basement reusing footage multiple times.

Genre-fication

Replicant was one of several films about cloning that had prominence in the early 2000s, but has little to do with the actual process of cloning. The 6th Day is actually a more accurate portrayal of cloning, weirdly enough. In fact, this film only uses the word clone twice, once when Jake asks what he’s seeing. He says that the Feds have made a clone, but they quickly correct him: replicant. There’s a distinction between the two, with replicants obviously being born and raised to adulthood in a much quicker way, along with the added telepathic abilities. It’s almost laughable that this genetic double was grown within a single year. But Van Damme does a good job of playing the role as a character that is child-like and innocent, creating a definite distinction between his two roles.

Aside from the cloning, there’s nothing else in the film that makes it science-fiction. It doesn’t take place in the near future and there’s no other advanced technology or social differences from the present day. Replicant uses this limited scope to explore the implications of the cloning of the killer versus the character of Edward Garrotte. This is actually quite refreshing, since the filmmakers can focus solely on the dichotomy between the Replicant and Killer without having to spend a lot of time creating a futuristic world.

Societal Commentary

The main theme for the film is obviously the Nature versus Nurture argument. This is the sociological question that debates whether people are more affected by their nature (genetics) or their nurture (environment and upbringing). Replicant appears to come down on the side of nurture being the biggest determination on the outcome of a person’s socialization. Edward Garrotte, the killer, grew up in an abusive household where his mother often scolded him and told him what a bad boy he was. She killed her husband and eventually tried to burn the house down. This trauma led Garrotte (originally known as Luc Savard) to grow up to hate women, creating an MO of killing mother’s (with facial moles) who were mean to their children, and then lighting them on fire. Certainly these crimes must have helped him process his upbringing, right?

Jake worries that the Replicant will follow a similar path of harmful actions. Jake is uncertain what drives the Killer, and as such treats Replicant with distrust and abusiveness immediately. The filmmakers attempt to put the audience on Jake’s side, by making it seem as if Replicant attacked Jake’s step-son, Danny. Jake delivers a beating to Replicant having assumed that he was the cause of Danny’s bloody lip, only for it to be revealed that the dog was to blame for the accident. Jake’s mom sees some of this abuse and tells the ex-cop to not treat the person like a criminal. The idea being that people treated like criminals will eventually become criminals themselves. From this point on, Jake offers minor kindnesses to Replicant, which results in the clone choosing Jake over his own flesh and blood.

The Science in The Fiction

As with many other films about clones from this era, the science behind the cloning process is ludicrous. Adult clones are raised in a fraction of the time that it would take for a real person to develop to the same level. Given the Replicant’s accelerated growth rate, growing into a 40-year old in one year, we can assume that he will be dead within another year. Add on to that, the absurdity of a DNA strand to provide memories or even the psychic ability to tap into the other versions of oneself. But it happens to be where the film goes, and at least it’s consistent throughout, having both Replicant and Garrotte appear to have psychic flashes of each other.

The real science in the film is the psychology of the criminal mind. As discussed above, the upbringing of an individual is key to their mental stability and inclination to commit crime. It makes one wonder if the National Security Force was cloning individuals to assist with criminal psychology, or if there was some other scheme that they were involved in, but found out that the psychic and psychological elements were useful in stopping criminals. It almost seems like the premise for a television series, where each week a different criminal is cloned, and assigned to an unsuspecting officer to assist in the capture of their nemesis. Unsurprisingly, that would be called Replicant: The Series. I wonder why that never took off?

The Final Frontier

Besides Jean-Claude Van Damme playing multiple roles in the film, his killer character has multiple names associated with them. Originally known only as The Torch, Jake discovers that the killer’s true identity is Edward Garrotte (also a name for a device used to strangle people), and originally born as Luc Savard (leaning into Van Damme’s heritage). This duplicity in the character, and with the actor, channels the various multiple identities that people assume everyday. Depending on our interactions, we might be viewed as a saint or sinner to different people. Luckily, those interactions probably do not include burning someone to death.

The Replicant is depicted as being fond of the rain, and Jake’s final line indicates the same. This is an interesting element to the film, since Jake’s discovery of Garrotte’s backstory indicates that he was saved from dying as a child because it rained on the day his mother set the house on fire. Replicant somehow has this information–encoded in his DNA no doubt–and feels an affinity for the rain at a deep level. It’s a little hokey, but something that makes the film more than just an action thriller.

Replicant is a fun film that treats the audience as somewhat intelligent, but glosses over a lot of little things in order to tell the bigger picture story of two characters made up of the same genetic material who have different outcomes in life. Van Damme is obviously getting older, with the action scenes not being as intense as in his earlier films. But his portrayal of two characters, who happen to look alike, is smooth enough to distinguish one from another. JCVDs performance might just edge this out, and make Replicant a slightly better and more enjoyable film than Schwarzenegger’s overly slick The 6th Day.

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