There are so many objective facts one could write about Knock Off that make it hard not to smile, if not laugh out loud, while reading them. For example: "Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a Hong Kong-based fashion designer …" or "Rob Schneider plays an undercover CIA agent …" or "The plot involves miniature-but-powerful nanobombs sewn into knock-off designer jeans …" All true. And all utterly absurd.

And yet, that is the very essence of Knock Off, the second of Tsui Hark's Van Damme-starring American/Hong Kong co-productions (the other being 1997's Double Team, which has its own list of objective howlers, starting with a starring role for basketball badboy Dennis Rodman when he was at the height of his neon-headed notoriety). By the late 1990s, Van Damme had established himself as a significant above-the-title movie star, having headlined 15 movies in less than a decade following his breakthrough Bloodsport (1988). He had already worked with several noted Hong Kong auteurs who were dipping their feet in the Hollywood pool: John Woo, who directed him in Hard Target (1993), and Ringo Lam, with whom he worked on Maximum Risk (1996). While many of his roles were straight-faced action heroes, Van Damme had already shown a propensity for good humor and taking shots at his own star status, and one has a hard time imagining that he didn't relish the opportunity to wallow in the goofy action shenanigans Tsui Hark cooked up.

The screenplay is credited to Steven E. de Souza, who co-wrote Die Hard (1988) and wrote and directed the notoriously troubled Van Damme-starring Street Fighter (1994), but the finished film is all Hark. Van Damme was clearly at his disposal, as so many of the fight sequences that would have typically highlighted his martial arts prowess are chopped up into nearly abstract flashes of movement and color while whip pans, smash zooms, and absurd slow motion abound. There isn't a canted angle Hark that is too canted or a wild camera movement too wild for Hark to throw it into the mix (some have suggested that he was essentially treating the film as an experiment in extremism, rather than attempting to make something coherent and defensible). If someone were to make a parody of what an avant-garde Jean-Claude Van Damme Hong Kong action comedy might look like, Knock Off is a good approximation.

The story is set against the backdrop of the British hand-over of Hong Kong to China (which just adds color and has little impact on the film's narrative). As noted earlier, Van Damme plays a Hong Kong fashion designed named Marcus Ray who is trying to be taken seriously after years of selling cheap high-fashion imitations His fast-talking American partner, Tommy Hendricks, is played by the aforementioned Rob Schneider, who at the time was transitioning from his successful four-year run on Saturday Night Live (1990-1994) to leading roles in comedies like Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999) and The Hot Chick (2002). He looks much more comfortable with the film's humor than Van Damme (whose smiles all look terribly forced), but once we are asked to take him seriously, the wheels come off (at one point literally when he and Marcus participate in a rickshaw race through the back streets of Hong Kong).

There are gangsters, both Chinese and Russian, and a CIA overlord played by Paul Sorvino. There are also lots of explosions (most of which are green and all of which are done with poor optical effects), gunfights, and hard-eyed sass courtesy of Lela Rochon (who had recently had a breakout role in 1996's Waiting to Exhale) playing an American businesswoman confronting Marcus and Tommy about their knock-offs (granted, this sequence affords Hark one of his best visual gags, when he uses a high angle to make Rochon look like she is literally towering over Van Damme and Schneider). For the most part, everything feels rushed and overblown, but it is still fun in its own delirious, absurd right. There are moments of almost surreal weirdness, such as an early scene that finds hundreds of sunken dolls rising to the ocean surface, but then we are brought back down by a fight scene or slapstick comedy. Not surprisingly, Hark never made another film in Hollywood.

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