Lionsgate, out now

 

A scientist becomes obsessed with bringing back his family after they’re killed in a car crash… but some things are best left dead.

It feels appropriate that Jeffrey Nachmanoff’s cautionary tale of playing God should be called Replicas, because it’s a copy of pretty much every Frankenstein film that you’ve ever seen. The shame for brilliant neuroscientist Keanu Reeves is that he’s never watched one of those films and so hasn’t realised that they always end badly. This is ponderous, growly Keanu, and after his family die in a horrific car crash the first thing he does is call his own personal Igor to help him download their brain patterns and dispense of the bodies. You see, Dr Foster, who works for Bionyne Corp (these places only exist in sci-fi movies) has been working on experiments to transfer the imprinted copies of dead human minds into synthetic bodies and now wants to bring back his family.

Ed (the sidekick) knows it’s a bad idea from the word go – he speculates that they’re all going to hell – and provides three pods in which to grow clones of the family, the first dilemma here being which lucky family member won’t be returning. The police start sniffing round, the absence of the family gets noticed, and after 17 days the clones are grown. A simple transfer of the minds via some Minority Report hand swooshing and everything is fine, Keanu has his own family again… except that they are not the same. Things aren’t right, they are suspicious of their origins, and things start to go wrong.

Imagine one of the poorer instalments of Black Mirror or Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, but without the ironic or clever twist, or even one of those hokey TV movies from the 70s like The Darker Side of Terror, where you forgave the bad science because we lived in simpler times. This movie has no excuse to be dumb in its depiction of science, and neither does Dr Keanustein here, who has recently witnessed the process still isn’t working. The last thing that his wife told him is that he’s lost perspective on morality, and she was right, he has taken all leave of his senses.

Verdict: Every Frankenstein and cloning movie that you’ve ever seen, thrown into a script blender, given a minor jolt of energy and resurrected as a boring and preposterous sci-fi drama. 5/10

Nick Joy