CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Limerculer A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Freaktana A Major Disappointment

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Prismark10 Knock Off is the film that marked JCVD's rapid decline as a Hollywood star. It does looks like a cheap knock off of a martial arts action comedy movie. I can only guess that Jackie Chan rejected the original script.Set in Hong Kong in the eve of the British handover of the colony to the Chinese, which in no way explains why the place is crawling with CIA operatives. Jean Claude Van Damme plays Marcus Ray who is involved in fake fashion designs with Tommy Hendricks (Rob Schneider) as well as taking part in Rickshaw races.However Ray and Hendricks must stop the Russian mafia who are smuggling fake goods with micro bombs inserted inside.The plot is a confusing mess, so are the fight scenes. The special effects are bad with green smoke and explosions. The acting is hammy, by the late 1990s it was obvious that only Pauly Shore was below Schneider in marking a film as comedy death if one of them appeared in it.

SnoopyStyle It's 1997 Hong Kong. Marcus Ray (Jean-Claude Van Damme) and Tommy Hendricks (Rob Schneider) buy and sell cheap knock off merchandises. They get entangled in a deadly conspiracy when their rickshaw race is attacked by the Russians. Tommy knocks out police detective Ling Ho and they get detained. Karen Lee is an executive at V-Six jeans and she's angry at them trying to pass her their knock offs. She's raiding a factory leased by their friend Eddie Wang and threatens to send them to prison. Ray is shocked that his four-year partner Tommy works undercover for the CIA under Harry Johannson (Paul Sorvino).This is a rather silly movie. Van Damme and Schneider are trying to be a comedic duo. The joke is that all their products keep breaking. Neither are good actors and I think they make each other worst. The story is too much of a silly mess to explain. It's international espionage about nano-bombs in counterfeit jeans. Somebody should really reconsider this script. I'm willing to live with a lot from a Van Damme movie but this is too infuriating.

Python Hyena Knock Off (1998): Dir: Tsui Hark / Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Rob Schneider, Lela Rochon, Paul Sorvino, Carman Lee: The title is absolutely correct. Everyone tries to knock each other off while viewers struggle to stay awake. The story is simply an excuse for Jean-Claude Van Damme to physically beat the tar out of bad guys and further prove that acting isn't his strong point. Tiny button shaped bombs are placed in dolls and phony salesman Van Damme and Rob Schneider get involved after a friend is murdered. Tsui Hark handles the action but he fails to drag a good performance out of Van Damme or Schneider. Hark and Van Damme previously collaborated to bring the world another action embarrassment called Double Team. Together, these films can be strapped together and sold cheap in the bargain bin at the local supermarket. Schneider does as expected and that is to provide horrible comic relief. Lela Rochon has the misfortune of playing damsel in distress because she just happened to be within arms length of the producers during casting. Also wasting time is Paul Sorvino. No point but to entertain senseless violence. Double Team was a stupid movie so it should come as no surprise that Knock Off is just as dumb. I wish they would knock it off and write a decent script, or at least give viewers the option of knocking the film off with several blows of a baseball bat. Score: 2 / 10

Paul Andrews Knock Off is set in Hong Kong during June 1997 as it is returned to Chinese rule after over a century of British rule, as the festivities are about to start V-Six Jeans executives Marcus Ray (Jean-Claude Van Damme) & Tommy Hendricks (Rob Schneider) are paid a visit by V-Six Jeans American corporate executive Karen Lee (Lela Rochon) who says that half of their last shipment they sent to the States were knock off's. They get the local police involved & decide to raid a factory belonging to Eddie Wang (Wyman Wong) who was storing the consignment before shipment, it turns out that the Russian mafia have counterfeited V-Six Jeans with small bomb devices in the buttons which can be detonated at any time by remote control & intend to black mail the Government with the threat of blowing millions of innocent jean wearing Americans up after flooding the States with the knock off's...This Aruban, Hong Kong & American co-production was directed by Hark Tsui who had made the awful Double Team (1997) with JCVD but one year earlier & I have to say that I quite liked Knock Off, it's no masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination but it's fun if nothing else & much, much better than the aforementioned Double Team. The script by Steven E. de Souza definitely doesn't take itself too seriously with many comical & light hearted moments, both during the action scenes & the dialogue. There are some neat one-liners as various character's trade insults, argue with each other & try to be sarcastic, Knock Off might make you smile on a few occasions which is probably a good thing since you can't take it seriously at all. There's plenty of action although it's rather silly at times but one could say that's more down to director Tsui than Souza's script, it moves along at a nice enough pace but it can also be a frustrating film. The storyline is weak & the disjointed plot is a pretty poorly strung together excuse for various oddball action set-pieces. Most of the character's are very underdeveloped, the Russian mafia angle in particular seems almost like an afterthought, the various twists are a bit underwhelming too & the main bad guy at the end just comes from nowhere & has little or no motivation. Having said that JCVD & Schneider's character's are likable & Rochon's feisty CIA agent with attitude is memorable.Director Tsui does a decent job here, he certainly injects the films action scenes with a degree of energy & visual flair. From high camera angles he has the camera spiral towards the ground to focus on JCVD, from placing a camera actually inside knock off trainers to see the glue & steams tear apart to various other cool little tricks & camera positions Knock Off looks pretty good & has had a fair amount of imagination put into it's visuals. The action scenes are undoubtedly silly, from JCVD holding off an entire mob of machete wielding thugs to a scene when he drives a car out of a second storey car park window which then hits a metal container, flips over & JCVD them drives off! The fights are OK but maybe not violent or bloody enough, all this comedy stuff is fine but when it comes down to it I'd have liked to have seen some proper action violence. There are many scenes which don't really work, many scenes which look silly, in reality wouldn't be possible & really do stretch the films already very thin credibility.With a supposed budget of about $35,000,000 Knock Off is well made & has good production values & stunts although the green CGI computer explosions look awful. Mostly shot on location in Hong Kong while the 2nd unit stuff was shot in the Philippines. The acting is alright, JCVD is up to his usual standards, Schneider is OK as the comic relief while Lela Rochon steals every scene she's in.Knock Off is a decent & fun action flick from JCVD, it's better than a lot of his recent output & much better than Double Team but it's maybe a bit too silly & the story is rather weak for it to become any sort of classic. Good harmless if forgettable & very far fetched fun.