“Hostage etiquette: Kidnapper pays the incidentals.”

Justin’s rating: If I starred in this, I would’ve wanted to get paid by the bullet

Justin’s review: You know that phenomenon of losing things when you move house and how it nags you that you’ll never find them again? We here at Mutant Reviewers experienced this same effect as a chunk of old reviews somehow got completely lost in our website transition a while back, and no searching any archives has turned them up.

Thus, every so often I’ll stumble across a movie that I know we reviewed at some point… but I can’t find it. But hey, it’s a good excuse for a rewatch! One of those fabled lost reviews was for The Replacement Killers, a late-90s action flick that had our approval back in the day.

With John Woo’s Hong Kong-style all over this (Woo exec produced) and Chow Yun-Fat delivering a solid performance as he was breaking into Hollywood, The Replacement Killers is a cut above your generic action thriller. This is also an early entry in the ’90s Cool genre (I really need to make that a category), especially considering that we start in a dark nightclub with heavy industrial techno beats.

Chow Yun-Fat made his western debut with this movie, which serves as a nice on-ramp to his brand of slow-mo gun-fu that had been delighting eastern moviegoers for a decade prior. I can only imagine someone being impressed (and rightly so) with his role and learning that he was this mega-star in Hong Kong with so many iconic films that were worth seeing.

Yun-Fat is John Lee, an assassin who owes a mobster one last hit (there are specific punch cards for these things). But when he balks at the assignment — killing the kid of an LA detective (Michael Rooker, Guardians of the Galaxy) — Lee ignites a furious round of retributions against him and his own family.

Now the chase and the fight is on, as John Lee tries to smuggle his family to safety with the help of a spunky forger named Meg (Mina Sorvino, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion) and a good monk friend who’s probably toast because he’s not on the poster. But the mobsters send out all manner of replacement killers (hey, the title!) including Danny Trejo to ensure that there will be lots and lots of firefights.

There’s no way around it: The Replacement Killers is a slick movie oozing with style above all else. Yun-Fat gets to do his double-fisted pistol thing alongside Sorvino, who looks stunning while being a decent action understudy. I’d forgotten how great of an actress she was and really wish we’d seen a lot more of her in the 2000s.

There are so many great action set pieces here, such as a car wash that totally gets trashed. This is the kind of movie where gun bullets propel people back a good forty yards and squibs explode like popped pimples on a teenager’s face. Allegedly, this set some sort of record at the time for the most bullets fired in a western movie, but I can’t find firm details on that.

The reason why that missing review sticks out in my mind is that The Replacement Killers was largely dismissed by the general moviegoing public back in ’98. So it became one of those orphaned films that we adopted and championed… until it ghosted us.

Well, here’s to a family reunion of sorts. I absolutely loved revisiting this movie with its groovy style, pumping soundtrack, excellent gunplay, and more than a few earned laughs. Maybe we can make a few more converts in favor of The Replacement Killers even today.

Intermission!

• A dark nightclub with techno? Either Blade or the Terminator is going to rip this place UP.
• All giant ships at night must have a string of sparks falling over their sides. People love to be weldin’ at night, let me tell you.
• So much slow-mo. So much.
• Meg’s got a pretty cool obstacle course of an apartment with sooooo much film hanging in her darkroom
• “Well I’ve always considered myself a feminist pioneer.”
• “Is it my perfume or something? You’re the second guy today to assume I need, want, or will accept help.”
• Wait, why did the bad guys turn on the car wash? That only gave their enemy cover!
• Dislocated knee resetting scene… did not (k)need to see that
• Ladies and gents, the scariest arcade ever
• Suitcase machine guns!
• “Standing aside is no different than pulling the trigger, John.”
• Good ol’ magical bullet wound powder for what ails ya