I finally got around to watching "Knock Off", the Jean Claude Van Damme / Rob Schneider action vehicle of 1998.
I was completely surprised. I'm not saying it was good nor bad, but nothing prepared me for what I saw.
It's pretty clear this film was made in Hong Kong with an all Hong Kong crew. In fact, the director of the film was the director of one of my favorite Jet Li films "Once Upon a Time In China". The visual style of the movie was extraordinarily Asian. Flowing camera, fast rapid tempo, fighting choreography, violence, comedy, slapstick, structure, twists, and sanity were all on par with any chop socky film.
I'm a big fan of the Fortune Star imports (Fox division that remasters and distributes many early films of Jackie Chan, John Woo, Jet Li, Yuen-Woo Ping, Chow Yun-Fat, etc.), so I'm used to seeing these kinds of movies. However, I fear that the rest of America wasn't expecting a movie like this back in '98; I remember the film getting a fairly wide release. So the movie's plot is pretty silly (bombs embedded into counterfeit merchandise) and the audio dubbing is atrocious, but the style of the movie is completely unlike any other Hollywood action movie at that time (to this day still). I got a feeling that had an effect on the five people who actually saw this film back then.
Luckily, there's the cheap world of DVDs and rentals. If someone ends up watching this movie, it's because they wanted to.
Might be a roundabout way of asking, but is this movie anything like "Double Team" (another Van Damme and director Tsui Hark team up)?
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