The Replacement Killers (mini review)

I like The Replacement Killers. I think that it is a solid action movie. But I also feel that the movie doesn't allow Chow Yun-Fat to show us Americans what he is capable of. The movie places Yun-Fat into a scenario that he has seen many times before: that of an assassin who tries to do good and is hunted for it. We have seen him do the same thing in The Killer, a movie that is so much better than The Replacement Killers. The Replacement Killers gets the look of a Hong Kong Heroic Bloodshed movie down, but it doesn't get anything else right. When John Woo films bullet hits, not only do the intended targets get hit, but so does everything else resulting in a chaos of damage with almost nothing left standing. When bullets hit in American movies, there is still things left standing. Yun-Fat is left posing for the camera in the all the different poses that we have come to love from Hong Kong cinema, but there is no heart. The Replacement Killers is a soulless effort, but one that still entertains. It is empty, but somehow we still like it.