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. At the Harbour Mall, Holiday, Showcase, Tri-Boro, and Woonsocket cinemas.

-- Peter Keough