Movie Review: Replicas

Replicas

Director: Jeffrey Nachmanoff

Starring: Alice Eve, Keanu Reeves, Emily Alyn Lind, Thomas Middleditch, John Ortiz, Emjay Anthony

Rating: PG-13

Runtime: 107 minutes

Keanu Reeves is an odd bird. He can take the movies of superstar roles, and he can take the movies that are destined to fly under the radar. Replicas is the latter, but as we learned with Destination Wedding last year, some of those low-flying films can be quite good. Still, viewers (mainly parents) should beware that this can be a hard movie to get through.

The nuts and bolts of Replicas has Keanu Reeves playing Will, a neuroscientist that is tasked with moving the consciousness of deceased soldiers into robot bodies with synthetic brains. This project is on the verge of having its funding pulled due to lack of success. During a vacation with his wife, Mona (Alice Eve), and their three kids Sophie, Matt, and Zoe, a terrible accident befalls them leaving Will the lone survivor of a car crash. Bringing in his co-worker and friend Ed (Thomas Middleditch), Will hatches a plan to try and bring his family back through science. As usual, things don’t always go as planned; Will must juggle the outside world such as his family’s school teachers and friends that are aware of their absences.

Some of Replicas twists and turns were very overused and cliched and some of them I enjoyed. What I didn’t enjoy was the very shoddy CGI work that is on display. Anything that wasn’t practical effects looks too fake for a film released in 2019. There really is no reason for it to be this poor when we have seen better from smaller budgets. Another issue that could have been fixed is the wooden acting here. Alice Eve is especially guilty of this as she is sometimes delivering her lines like this is a Disney made-for-TV movie. Reeves and Middleditch do the heavy lifting and don’t really suffer from the acting problems and work together quite well.

Replicas was a half-way decent film that could have been better in different creative hands. Nothing about the story is very original, but if you look back into the tragic past of Keanu Reeves, you might see why he chose a project like this. Replicas won’t be the worst movie we see in 2019, but it definitely won’t be on Top 10 lists, either. Critics have been a little too harsh on Replicas, but is still isn’t a movie I can recommend, but…I mean…it is still Keanu.