From the annals of fast-food lore comes the legend of Colonel Sanders. Famed in the Deep South in the '30s for his secret fried chicken recipe, he sold his soul to become a trademark. Meanwhile, the corporate chefs reworked his chicken recipe until it bore little resemblance to the Colonel's famous dish. In fact, until his dying day, even as Sanders continued to shill for the multi-million dollar chicken empire bearing his name, he reputedly hated the taste of his own product.

With his first American film, Hong Kong action mega-start Chow Yun-Fat has become the Colonel Sanders of the appropriated Hong Kong style action film. The charismatic hero of The Killer, Hard Boiled, and City On Fire, must look upon his crossover film The Replacement Killers just as Sanders must have looked upon his cheapened chicken recipe: slick and neatly packaged, but tasteless and with no nutritional value.

Yun-Fat plays hired killer John Lee, a Chinese immigrant who, under the thumb of underworld kingpin Terence Wei (Kenneth Tsang), must eliminate three victims of Wei's wrath. In return, Wei will guarantee the safety of his mother and sister in Shanghai. But when Lee is ordered to blow away the seven-year-old son of police detective Stan Zedkov (Michael Rooker), he suddenly suffers pangs of conscience and can't pull the trigger. Knowing that Wei will have him eliminated for not following through with his obligations, and that Wei will also get medieval on his family in Shanghai, Lee has to find a way back to China to save his kin. When he visits beautiful forger Meg Coburn (Mira Sorvino) in order to get a fake passport, Wei's boys burst in shooting. With Meg becoming a second target, Lee takes off. Wei's men pursue, guns a-blazing, through upscale restaurants, gritty automated car washes, and even a Mr. Magoo film festival. Hilariously, amid all the mayhem, the crowds in these venues conveniently vanish entirely, giving the playing field over to the hired killers. And, as if on a time clock, the cops always manage to arrive after the gunfighters heave ceased, Rooker giving the decimated environment a "What happened here?" look. Finally, Lee intones phonetically "I'll need guns" and decides to make a stand, Meg dutifully cocking his pistols.

In Antoine Fuqua's debut feature, Fuqua takes a dumbed down approach to the John Woo style. Fuqua's original claim to fame as a director of music videos carried over into The Replacement Killers and the film has that empty music video flash and style. But Fuqua's aping of Woo is all a tired technical exercise. The film looks and feels sanitized and bleached-out, as if it were a Chow Yun-Fat video game. What The Replacement Killers needs is a bit of Woo's over-the-top operatic emotionalism. When Fuqua tries to convey a sense of Woo's jagged stylization through the drumming and thumping soundtrack --doors always open in slow motion to a thunderous electronic crescendo -- the musical cues make the flatness of the film ever more apparent. All Fuqua can convey in the end is a sense of chow Yun-Fat being trapped inside a Hong Kong action film theme park.

The acting is all false effect. Sorvino tries to act tough -- she says stuff like "When the gun is in my hand we're gonna have this conversation again" -- but her graduate school cuteness belies her attempts to look like a domestic Michelle Yeoh. She does get to pump bad guys with bullets and scream like Sylvester Stallone while wearing a black slip and ruby red lipstick, but in spite of how tough she tries to act she ends up looking like a gun-toting bimbo.

And then there's Yun-Fat. Slumped down heavily in a chair, obsessing about the safety of a family we never see or care about, falling to the floor while shooting bullets from pistols in both hands, or covering his pained eyes with some cool shades, Yun-Fat is playing a role he has done many times before. His John Lee is performed with a weary familiarity like someone who has played Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof for ten years running. For both Yun-Fat and his audience, it is something played out and old.

A new DVD features an extended cut and includes two making-of featurettes.



Don't worry, we can always get more killers.