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Knock Off

As knockoffs go, Knock Off tries harder. Its first few minutes compress a boat chase, a rickshaw race, a shootout in a supermarket, and scores of floating pink baby dolls exploding into pretty green fire -- all shot from exhaustingly bizarre camera angles, utilizing slow motion, freeze frames, breakneck editing, and enough high-tech computerized diggery-do to fill out an entire Peter Greenaway retrospective. That these cinematic fireworks fail to conceal a lack of characters, plot, or intelligent dialogue is beside the point. Or perhaps is the point.

As he did with the now successfully Hollywoodized John Woo, Jean-Claude Van Damme here taps another Hong Kong auteur, Tsui Hark, to jolt his phlegmatic Muscles from Brussels into a semblance of an action thriller, with pyrotechnical but inane results. Van Damme plays a happy-go-lucky purveyor of designer knockoffs played for a dupe by renegade ex-KGB types, the CIA, and the Hong Kong police in a scheme involving miniaturized explosives smuggled to the United States in his products. With co-stars Paul Sorvino and SNL's Rob Schneider similarly embarrassing themselves, the best that can be said for Knock Off is that it bears an authentic brand name.

-- Peter Keough