I wasn’t able to take notes while watching this, so this probably won’t be as detailed as some of my other posts. That’s probably just as well, since I don’t have a lot of positive things to say. In fact, let me get that positive thing out there right now—Tom Middleditch was the best actor of the bunch. And when the guy who does phone commercials is the Brando of the group…well, you’re in trouble.

Replicas has a great premise: Will Foster (Keanu Reeves) is a scientist (Keanu as a scientist should have been warning enough, one would think) working on transferring human consciousness, shortly after death, to an artificial, robotic body. Sadly, it’s not working, and his financing is in jeopardy. It seems that upon waking the human/robot, it flips out from the shock of the new body. When his family is killed in a tragic car accident, he enlists the help of colleague Ed (Thomas Middleditch) to clone them new bodies so he can transfer their minds (self-identity, memories, etc.) into the newly-cloned bodies. And that’s pretty much it. Pretty standard sciencey Frankenstein “is it moral to do this?” stuff. Nothing terribly original; just the same basic story updated to place it in the context of the modern scientific realm.

Unfortunately, it’s bad. And not just bad, but laughably bad. Actually, that might be another redeeming factor of the film—we had a good time poking fun at the ridiculousness of it all. Keanu has never been among the best of actors, and he’s not great here, but neither is anyone else. Alice Eve as Keanu’s wife is one step above mannequin. The kids are completely wasted and felt more like props than characters. They might as well have given Will’s boss (John Ortiz) a black cape and mustache to twirl. And as I mentioned, the only character with believable, human responses was poor Ed, dragged along on Will’s mad ride.

The actors shouldn’t really take the brunt of the criticism, though. It’s the writing. This is writer Chad St. John’s third feature length writing credit (after London has Fallen and Peppermint) and it shows. I see the same kind of issues here with structure that I see in the first two. One of the big ones is that he leaves scenes that should be dramatized, handled as exposition. In Peppermint, for example, we never see Jennifer Garner’s character dispensing justice to the people who actually killed her family. Do the other corrupt individuals deserve what’s coming? Sure. But you’ve gotta show her taking care of the perpetrators themselves. Otherwise, it’s not dramatically satisfying. In this film, it’s the family. It feels like they’re not onscreen very much, and when they are, we don’t get anything but basic family interaction. (“Hey kids! Who wants pancakes?!”) That keeps us from connecting with them and makes it hard for us to care about them.

Even worse is the science. These days, a screenwriter has to really be on the top of his or her game when it comes to science. At least if you’re going to make a science fiction film, that is. Gone are the days where you can get away with creating life with a lightning strike during a thunderstorm. The science doesn’t have to be exactly true-to-life, but it does have to be believable. This isn’t. I can’t get into it too much without spoiling the story, which I don’t like to do, even for a film this bad, but I can give you one example. At one point, Will has to erase a person from the others’ memories. So what does he do? He loads up their minds, which are stored in a big ‘ol hard drive, into his mind-transfer computer, and does a search for the person’s name! (Apparently, Will is financed by Google.) Even if we believed that finding memories of one person in another’s consciousness was as easy as Asking Jeeves, how do you get around the fact that people are often known by a number of names, and even some nicknames? Keanu himself, at various points in the film is called “William,” “Will,” and—if I remember correctly—“Willie.” But what if that person in question was also known as “honey,” “babe,” or “sweetie”? What about “kiddo”?  See my point?

It’s just bad. Bad, bad, bad. If you feel like inviting some friends over for a few beers to laugh and shout out comments? Have at it; it should be fun. IMDB says 5.6. (Really??) I say more like a 4, and that’s because it does have some decent production values for a film made on the cheap. And Middleditch. (running time 1:47)