When Chow Yun-Fat came to the US, he brought a reputation from various Heroic Bloodshed epics, from John Woo and Ringo Lam – a reputation as an action star with a strong acting range. So, it’s unsurprising that his early roles would fall into that same category, with The Replacement Killers doing a film in that style, but with some admittedly more Hollywood sensibilities.
Yun-Fat plays John Lee, an assassin for the Triads in an unspecified city (implied to be Los Angeles) – who is indentured to do a series of hits for boss Terence Wei. After Wei sends Lee to kill the child of a police officer who killed Wei’s adult son in a bust, Lee decides that he doesn’t need that shit in his life, and tries to make a break back to China. Unfortunately, Wei has enough control of the LA Underworld that Lee’s exits are limited, and now Wei wants Lee dead along with the kid. Forger Meg Coburn (Mira Sorvino) gets caught up in this when Lee goes to her to get a forged passport, and the two end up on the run – trying to get away from Wei and to stop his… Replacement Killers.
This is the first film from Antoine Fuqua, before he would make his name with Training Day – and he absolutely, positively understood the assignment, and as far as I’m concerned he passed it with flying colors. He isn’t shooting the movie like John Woo would, and he shouldn’t, and it’s wrong to expect him to do so. Instead, it’s clear that he watched a lot of the hallmarks of the Heroic Bloodshed action movie – The Killer, Hard Boiled, and A Better Tomorrow 2 (for examples), and recognized the kind of action that is the signature of that particular part of the genre, before figuring out how he wanted to adapt it to the US, and in the process put his own flourishes on the movie.
Consequently, everything in this movie just feels right. It doesn’t necessarily have the kind of complicated ending or the sort of melancholic finale that you’d expect from The Killer. But what it does have is that kind of emotional resonance – Lee is the kind of hitman who does the wrong thing for (based on his own internal calculus) the right reasons. When he goes against Wei, his reflexive reaction is “I need to protect my family”, and aims to skip town to do that. Coburn doesn’t have that kind of family to protect, putting her in the position that, once she gets the whole story, she’s able to put pressure on Lee to go on the offensive.
Speaking of which, Yun-Fat and Sorvino have some really good chemistry, of the kind that gets messily romantic but doesn’t go very far in that direction. Some of this is due to anti-Asian bias by studio executives when it comes to them not being willing to view Asian men as being potential romantic leads (an issue that persists to this day). That said, while this means that the romance between our two leads basically ended up on the cutting room floor (either with footage being excised, or with the material being cut from the script), Fuqua does try to find ways to get that in there – and takes whatever opportunities he can to just let Yun-Fat smolder.
John Lee basically brings the sort of Byronic Hero energy that he almost had with Ah Jong in The Killer. Ah Jong’s solitude was tempered by his desire to atone for what he’d done to Jennie, and with his emotional connection with her, Jennie was Ah Jong’s only emotional connection out of the underworld life. By comparison, Lee in The Replacement Killers is a more isolated figure, even more fitting with the brooding Byronic archetype.
And then there’s the action, Fuqua has a strong sense of adapting the cinematic language of this particular aspect of Hong Kong action cinema to Hollywood. The action scenes have a really vivid sense of geography to them, combined with the dynamism that action scenes in Hong Kong actions scenes have and Hollywood fight scenes often lack. The same way that the opening tea-shop gunfight in Hard Boiled goes on to use absolutely every single aspect of the set for the fight scene, scenes like the gunfight at the car wash in The Replacement Killers goes on to use every aspect of the location – the hallway parallel to the car wash itself, the interior of the call wash, the parking lot on either side, the office, the adjacent garage. The only thing they don’t use is the bathroom.
In short – The Replacement Killers is a movie that was very heavily panned on its release, and I think unfairly so. It’s a movie that does a tremendous job of adapting the concept of the kind of “gun opera” action film that John Woo, Tsui Hark, and Ringo Lam had made with Yun-Fat in Hong Kong in the past, and making it work in the framework of Hollywood. I just think that audiences weren’t necessarily ready for it.
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