KNOCK OFF

• Starring Jean Claude Van Damme, Rob Schneider and Lela Rochon
• Directed by Tsui Hark
• Rated R, with extreme violence; running time 90 minutes
• With 10 as a must-see, Jack gives this film a 1

By Eleanor O'Sullivan
Gannett News Service

(Aug. 5, 1998) -- The perfect movie has arrived for audiences with the attention spans of a nanosecond: Knock Off, an assault on the senses starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.

This intensely noisy, incessantly violent film is from Hong Kong directing legend Tsui Hark. The plot revolves around an international ring of thugs that plans to extort $100 million, monthly, from super powers, or they'll detonate itty bitty bombs around the globe.

The bombs have been hidden in goods to be imported to the United States, including toys and jeans. The ringleader of the plot keeps a teeny-weeny detonator at his side; he smiles sadistically as he gives the detonator a test run in Hong Kong.

You may well ask why the United States needs another pair of jeans, especially imported from Hong Kong. It's a stretch, but this is where the title knock off comes in -- the lethal jeans are cheap imitations of an American brand that Chinese hoods boomerang back to our shores.

This is where Van Damme, looking ultra-fit in and out of his jeans, enters the picture.

Van Damme is a jeans salesman in business with a whiny American (Rob Schneider). Trouble arrives and the decibel count soars when Van Damme's Chinese stepbrother, a smuggler, runs afoul of four unpleasant groups: Russian and Chinese hoods, the bombing thugs and the CIA.

Off we go into breathless, nonstop mayhem, with coherence and character development nonexistent. The filmmakers know their audience.

Against the backdrop of last year's turnover of Hong Kong by the British to the Chinese, the proficient Hark and his technical crew put Van Damme, Schneider and Lela Rochon through an exorbitant number of stunts, explosions, chases, property damage, knife slashings, thick spurting blood and bad jokes. They aim to stop the bombs from going off.

In telling that story, Hark (A Better Tomorrow, The Lovers) goes wild with tricky camera angles and gimmicky photography. At no point does he favor the direct and simple.

Aside from Van Damme, a spunky action hero who seems to do many of his own stunts, just about everybody is colorless and robotic.

And only one bit of dialogue is worth retelling: Van Damme, beat from assorted slings and arrows to his buff body, announces, "I'm gonna find some place to collapse."

I know exactly how he feels.