Slick. Violent. High body count. Virtually non-stop action. If this sounds good, then read no more. Just go out and see The Replacement Killers. You'll like it.
Unfortunately, if anything else matters to you, you'll need to know The Replacement Killers is 90 per cent gun-fighting, with ten per cent left to cover plot and character development. The first five minutes of the film sets the tone - barely a word spoken and five people shot dead.
Throughout this film, the gun fighting is well done - plenty of action, well choreographed, and rarely more than five minutes between battles. The body count is large, and there must be 10,000 rounds of ammunition fired along the way (of course, the bad guys are slow at the trigger and very poor shots).
It's a shame there's nothing more to The Replacement Killers. The filmmakers might not care, but the actors clearly have enough presence to make the characters interesting.
Chow Yun-Fat has plenty of charisma, and I for one would have liked it if he'd been given a chance to give his character more depth. The same is true of Mira Sorvino. Although she at first seems to be forcing it a bit as a hard-talking tough girl, her character also might have amounted to something if they'd allowed her to give us some sense of what she was all about. Instead, she just plays a lone woman who forges documents for slimy people and we are given no clue as to why or how she got there. Even more problematic is the lack of explanation for her mid-film transformation from an everybody-for-themselves independent type to a morally driven team player.
There's probably no point in complaining. Some folks will love the action, and they might have messed things up if they tried to make The Replacement Killers and more substantial than it is.
