All Rise...

Judge Gordon Sullivan looks like no one...and everyone.

The Charge

Desperate times call for desperate crimes.

The Case

It's a perennial plot in sitcom television: take a naive child with a lovable pet, kill the pet off, and send the parents off on a quest to find an animal that matches the deceased one. Of course this tells us something about how we think about animals. It's almost always one of the smaller animals that's perceived as less intelligent that the parents try to replace. It's almost always a fish or a hamster, never a cat or dog. These stories tell us two things—one is that adults don't perceive hamsters and fish as having personalities, and that children are generally more perceptive than we give them credit for. Occasionally, this type of story plays out with a human—twins getting mistaken for one another, the rich one disappearing so that the poor one has to "fake" it. Rarely, however, does a film try to pass off a non-twin "replacement" story. The Lookalike does, and its tale of former basketball stars and ruthless drug dealers will be about as difficult to swallow as the premise suggests.

William Spinks (John Savage, The Thin Red Line) wants to finally get with a particular beautiful woman. His underlings, especially Bobby (John Corbett, Sex and the City) and Frank (Steve Bauer, Scarface) want to help him out. The only problem is that she's dead, so The Lookalike (Gillian Jacobs, Community) gets called in. Getting her embroils the pair in the lives of an ex-basketball star (Jerry O'Connell, Sliders), a deaf amputee (Scottie Thompson, Star Trek) and the basketball star's brother (Justin Long, Tusk), who's in hock to a local crook.

One of the perennial questions of film viewership (and film reviewing) is the relationship between style and substance. Do we, as viewers, want weighty, dramatic material in a simple, digestible form, or would we rather indulge in the surface pleasures offered by narrative twists, flashy visuals and archetypal characters. Of course the two modes don't have to be mutually exclusive; Quentin Tarantino has proved that with both Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained.

But too often, filmmakers choose one mode over the other, offering weighty dramatic material but with little in the way of visual storytelling. Or, as The Lookalike does, offering plenty of cinematic craziness but with absolutely no real emotional or intellectual center. By opening on a tale of drug dealers and low-level criminals, the film hopes to earn some points by appealing to our love of crime stories. But all the characters we see are so hastily drawn, their relationships a mixture of coincidence and cliché, that it's hard to care a single wit for any of them.

Lackluster characters can be redeemed, but The Lookalike puts them in a plot that's goofy for an all-out comedy, and simply unworkable in this amalgam of drama/comedy/thriller. The idea of a desperate ex-sports star trying to regain his former glory in a different realm by getting involved in the drug trade isn't a bad idea, but it's handled with such disregard for plausibility that I found it impossible to care.

In the film's defense, it has some pretty decent performances. Most of the main characters are played by recognizable faces, from O'Connell to Justin Long and John Corbett. What admittedly talented actors are doing in a farce like this is difficult to discern, but they all do a fine enough job being game for the goofy dialogue and bizarre plot points they have to meander through. I can imagine all their talents being used to more noble ends, but fans of the actors will find that the film isn't a complete waste of time.

Well Go USA's The Lookalike (Blu-ray) isn't terrible. The 2.40:1/1080p AVC-encoded transfer is fine for the material. Detail is generally pretty strong, and colors are bold and bright, especially in outdoor sequences. Black levels stay pretty consistent and deep as well. It doesn't have the "pop" of the most perfect transfers, but it's definitely watchable. The DTS-HD 5.1 audio track keeps dialogue audible and gives a bit of surround activity where appropriate. It doesn't wow, but it's serviceable for the film.

Extras start with a behind-the-scenes featurette that does a fine, if superficial, job talking about the making of the film. There are also some deleted scenes that aren't particularly necessary, and the film's trailer.

The Lookalike isn't an aggressively bad film, but rather has too little ambition. Those with low expectations probably won't hate themselves for watching—especially fans of the actors—but it's not a film that most viewers are going to want to go out of their way to track down.

The Verdict

Guilty of being mistaken for a better movie.

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