Kill or be replaced.<BR>&nbsp;

Kill or be replaced.

Lovers of Hong Kong cinema, and especially John Woo`s A Better Tomorrow and The Killer, probably rejoiced to hear that the ultra cool hero of those classics, Chow Yun-Fat, was going Hollywood. Unfortunately, the vehicle Chow has chosen for his American debut is a very pale shadow of the Hong Kong action movie. He plays John Lee, a gun for hire, assigned by a vengeful New York based drug czar, Terence Wei, Kenneth Tsang - to kill the 7-year-old son of cop Stan Zedkov, Michael Rooker. It`s all a matter of revenge; Zedkov had killed Wei`s son during a drug bust. But when he gets the sprog in his rifle sights, Lee can`t pull the trigger - and his failure means that he`s now the target of Wei`s wrath, and so is his family in China. He needs a passport quickly, and the best supplier is Meg Coburn, Mira Sorvino, who, luckily for him, is also very handy with a gun...The Replacement Killers is an utterly inept action film in which even the numerous gun battles aren`t very interestingly staged. There`s very little plot - just a lot of rushing about with guns blazing to minimal effect. Chow is a solid presence, but he can`t do much with a script as impoverished as this, and Mira Sorvino, who looks like she`s having a very bad hair day in her first few scenes, is surely worthy of a better role than this one. German actor Jurgen Prochnow is utterly wasted.