By Robert Scucci
| Updated
If you’re one of those people who thinks that Keanu Reeves can do no wrong, then you probably haven’t seen Replicas– one of the most unintentionally hilarious sci-fi films that even John Wick himself couldn’t save from certain doom. With a plot that has more holes than that old pair of socks that you refuse to let go of, Replicas is the sloppiest sci-fi thriller that I’ve ever encountered, which is a shame because it has so much potential to be a comedy of errors of the highest caliber if it wasn’t trying so hard to play it straight.
Have you ever watched a movie that feels like it’s trapped in the wrong genre?
For me, that movie is Replicas, and you can stream the title on Tubi if you want to see for yourself what I mean.
A Breakthrough That Quickly Breaks Down
Keanu Reeves portrays William Foster in Replicas, and he’s a sort of mad scientist who’s devoted his life to finding a way to transfer human consciousness to android bodies. Using the same kind of transparent floating touch-screen technology that Tony Stark uses in the MCU, William gets stalled with his latest failed prototype, Subject 345. Thinking he’s close to a breakthrough, William becomes obsessed with troubleshooting the prototype that instinctually self-destructs upon waking, but his employer, the Bionyne Corporation, is ready to scrap the entire project because “colossal and repeated failure tends to spook shareholders” according to his colleague, Ed Whittle (Thomas Middleditch).
Knowing that the time he spends at work is causing his life to fall apart on the home front, William takes the weekend off to take his wife, Mona (Alice Eve), and his three children, Sophie (Emily Alyn Lind), Matt (Emjay Anthony), and Zoe (Aria Leabu) on a much needed boating trip.
As you would expect, the boat trip goes terribly wrong in Replicas because William’s family gets killed in a car accident before they could ever set sail.
Alone With His Clones
At first, William is devastated when his family gets killed in Replicas, but he quickly has a moment of clarity (read: insanity) when thinking about Subject 345’s failures, and suddenly has access to four fresh bodies that need resurrecting.
And how does William decide to see if he can successfully turn his family of corpses into functional replicas, you ask? He steals all of his extremely expensive and unwieldy equipment from Bionyne. Now operating out of his basement, William Jerry-rigs three cloning pods with car batteries only to remember that he’s got four dead family members that he needs to resurrect. Pulling names out of a hat, William, who’s moral and ethical compass deteriorates as he becomes increasingly obsessed with his work, decides that Zoe drew the metaphorical short straw and will be left to perish.
Successful in his restoration of the rest of his family, William decides to “eternal sunshine” his replicas of Mona, Sophie, and Matt so they have no memories of Zoe upon regaining consciousness. Meanwhile, everybody at Bionyne is sitting there, twiddling their thumbs, wondering where the heck William went, because he hasn’t physically showed up to work in weeks and they really need to know where he’s at with the whole infusing humanity with cybernetics thing he’s receiving an egregious amount of funding to accomplish.
Should Have Been A Comedy
Replicas suffers immensely from playing it straight, and the whole time I was watching it I was yelling at the TV to be funny. All of the elements for a quality comedy of errors lie just beneath the surface, but they’re suffocated by seriousness.
William’s alarming lack of qualms over playing god with his dead family would have totally landed if his character was wacky like Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown from the Back to the Future franchise or Rick Sanchez from Rick and Morty.
The idea of a mad scientist with little to no regard for the moral implications of what he’s trying to accomplish while shareholders are pounding at his door as he tries to shove his replicas into the coat closet so nobody knows what he’s up to, but immediately blowing his cover because he hasn’t slept in days and isn’t thinking right would have made this disaster of a sci-fi thriller and effective comedy if I had to weigh in.
Or even better, he forgets to hide Zoe’s body and has to explain to the rest of his family who the dead little girl laying on their living room floor is because he forgot to drop her corpse off at the dump.
Unfortunately, these morbid hypothetical situations I just made up for my own amusement never play out in Replicas, and we’re left with a disjointed mess of a story that makes little to no sense.
As of this writing, you can stream Replicas for free on Tubi.
