Knock Off


Fifteen minutes before the movie ended, I still had no idea who the good guys and who the bad guys were (except of course for the protagonist, played by Jean-Claude Van Damme). Not a good thing for what I thought was going to be a mindless action film.

Knock Off is about a fashion designer, Marcus Ray (Van Damme), getting mixed up with a bunch of counterfeiters ("knock offers") who plant "nano-bombs" in their counterfeit goods. For reasons I still can't fathom, it's set in Hong Kong as it is being handed over to China by the British. The goal of the counterfeiters/bombers is to extort the world for money. As Ray interacts with his environment (his partner Tommy Hendricks (Rob Schneider), the executive in charge of investigating the counterfeiting investigation Karen Leigh (Lela Rochon), CIA operative Harry Johanseen (Paul Sorvino), and competitor Skinny Wang (Glen Chin)), he soon realises that people aren't what they seem to be. Unfortunately, neither does the audience.

Knock Off's script appears as though it was the output of an automated "script generators", like the post-modernism paper generator on the web. Things make sense locally, but everything breaks apart when the global context is considered. A total waste of time.


Movie ram-blings || Ram Samudrala || me@ram.org