Knock Off (Tsui Hark, 1998).
Tsui Hark’s Knock Off (1998) begins with an amniotic scene: baby dolls underwater, suggesting birth or possibly rebirth. Submerged off the coast of Hong Kong, which passed from British to Chinese governance in the historic 1997 Handover, the dolls gesture toward new beginnings. But these aren’t flesh-and-blood infants: they’re products, manufactured imitations of the real thing and copies of each other. Detached from any sense of originality, these toys can be reproduced and distributed wherever the market leads. The movement of the dolls through the water evokes the global flow of goods under late capitalism, as well as the postmodernist shift away from reality into simulacra. Moreover, their synthetic nature complicates the birth allegory—in what sense was the Handover a “real” rebirth?
This is a fitting prologue for a film obsessed with the ersatz. Delivering on its title, Knock Off tracks two expat businessmen in Hong Kong (Jean-Claude Van Damme and Rob Schneider) who are sucked into an international whirlpool of high fashion, undercover agents, and counterfeit designer jeans secretly lined with mini-bombs. The sense of flux embodied by the film has special resonance for Hong Kong. In the years leading up to and immediately following 1997, the region was transient in at least two respects: in its position as a key node in transnational networks of finance—scholars Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover described Hong Kong as “a postmodern city [....] at the forefront of neo-liberal free-trade policies” and “one of the world’s capitalist showcases”—and in its status as first a colony and then a special administrative region, precariously caught between the political interests and sovereignties of different nations. But, at the turn of the century, this transience was also more broadly emblematic of a world unmoored and on the move, with the (possibly apocalyptic) deadline of Y2K further conferring—as the looming Handover did for Hong Kong—a sense of urgency, of time running out.
Knock Off (Tsui Hark, 1998).
Knock Off, which turns 25 this month, vividly channels this charged historical moment. Featuring dense, frenetic plotting and an even denser, more frenetic visual style, the film taps the widespread feeling of instability, of accelerating toward uncertain futures. The zany and convoluted nature of the narrative—two central characters are revealed to be CIA operatives, another agent turns out to be a bad guy, and the Triads, the Hong Kong police, and the Russians are all involved—is matched on a scene-to-scene, often moment-to-moment basis via convulsive bursts of broad comedy. Case in point: an early rickshaw race in which contenders careen into bystanders and each other and Schneider whips Van Damme’s behind with a fish, or the way actress Lela Rochan’s body becomes the habitual source of bawdy punchlines.
In the rickshaw scene and others, images often verge on hazy abstraction due to foreground clutter, reflective surfaces, focus shifting, rapid cutting, and tight close-ups on objects and bodies. Interspersed among these kinetic moments are shots that achieve a sense of vertiginous scale—overhead views that plummet to earth like a hawk diving for prey, for instance, or low-angle framing that makes characters tower like kaiju—resulting in scalar whiplash. Action scenes sometimes feel like borderline avant-garde catalogs of film techniques, oscillating wildly between slow motion, undercranking, superimposition, freeze frames, discontinuous shocks of color, and delirious flights of special effects spectacle, like a moment where the camera seems to enter a sniper scope from the front end and gaze directly at the gunman’s eye. This spectacular segment recalls the famous camera-eye superimposition from Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and director Dziga Vertov’s associated concept of the Kino-Eye, in which the film camera is celebrated for outstripping the capacities of human vision. Even if this point of connection is inadvertent, it feels fitting, given that both films deploy a maelstrom of techniques to evoke the speed and sprawl of their respective historical moments.
Top: Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929). Bottom: Knock Off (Tsui Hark, 1998).
To an extent, Knock Off’s narrative and formal kineticism is business as usual for director Tsui Hark. Repackaging and reinterpreting classic Chinese folklore elements for a globalized world, Tsui’s cinema has long been associated with acceleration: “Nationalism on speed” is how scholar Stephen Teo describes the director’s oeuvre. Along these lines, the revisionist wuxia film The Blade (1995) is both an extreme example and perfect distillation of Tsui’s aesthetic tendencies. Featuring a blistering, impressionistic visual style in which actions are often off-frame, out of focus, obscured by objects, or so rapid-fire that they can only be fleetingly glimpsed, The Blade envisions the world as a mercenary, multicultural hellscape where survival entails constant, adaptive movement. This ethos is best embodied by the hero’s decision to discard his martial arts manual—so central to The One-Armed Swordsman (1969), the film on which The Blade was based—in favor of an impromptu fighting style premised on perpetual motion.
Although speed is a distinctive component of Tsui’s cinema, it’s also part of the aesthetic toolkit of Hong Kong films in general. Shot on a fraction of Hollywood budgets and produced and distributed much more quickly than many other national cinemas, Hong Kong cinema is, in the words of scholar Esther M. Yau, marked by a “fetishization of speed,” which is evident in the “fast-paced rhythm in terms of shot length, dialogue duration, bodily movements, and use of multiple ellipses within scenes.” Writes Yau: “Without too much exaggeration, one could say that the speed of cultural production and consumption and the time inscribed in a Hong Kong film are generally in sync with the speed of investment, return, and financial trading that take place elsewhere, in many other world cities.” This accelerated film milieu bred shameless imitation: the constant parroting and parodying of box office successes and cultural trends to make a quick buck, with one of the most revisited themes being the Handover itself. As scholar Ackbar Abbas notes in his 1997 book Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, “Almost every [Hong Kong] film made since the mid-eighties, regardless of quality or seriousness of intention, seems constrained to make some mandatory reference to 1997.” Although this ubiquity speaks to the cultural prominence of the Handover, it also shows how the event was abstracted into a commodified image, packaged for easy consumption.
Borderline avant-garde visual abstraction. Top: The Blade (Tsui Hark, 1995). Bottom: Knock Off (1998).
Knock Off exemplifies the relationship between speed, globalization, capital, and pastiche at play in both Tsui’s filmography and Hong Kong cinema more broadly. Unlike many works that can be read as symptomatic of larger social forces, however, Knock Off is also more explicitly “about” these very forces. It shows how the act of counterfeiting something—of converting it to a reproducible imitation of the “real” thing—is the means by which the thing becomes mobile, circumventing the bounds of corporate proprietorship (the counterfeit jeans), national allegiances (the CIA double agent), and even the physical world (the film’s ostentatious use of CGI). But the film doesn’t claim to depict this reality—this paradoxical reality of unreality—in any authoritative way. Itself titled “Knock Off” and sporting a theme song by Sparks that opens with “I confess that this is really not my song / I bought it in Hong Kong / It’s a knock off,” the film extends the charge of commodification and imitation to itself, cheekily owning its influences and flirting with postmodernism’s hall-of-mirrors logic: everything is a representation and image of something else, leaving no ground of reality to stand on, no reference point from which to judge authenticity.
Had the film tried to make a definitive pronouncement about this state of things, it would have felt out of touch with the constantly shifting sands of the postmodern world. What Knock Off does instead is move with it. The bustling plot, the hyper-busy visual style, the proliferation of fakes upon fakes—the viewer is bounced around from one deceptive surface to another in a futile search for the real. Rather than distancing itself from the world to comment on it, the film internalizes the world’s restlessness, reproducing and participating in the borderless flux of it all. This process began as early as the production stage. A US-Hong Kong co-production featuring Van Damme as the cosmopolitan movie star—the second instance helmed by Tsui, following Double Team (1997)—and part of the larger ’90s fad of Hollywood importing Hong Kong talent like John Woo, Ringo Lam, Yuen Woo-ping, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Chow Yun-fat for its movies, Knock Off is itself literally an object of transnational circulation, a living testament to the globalized mobility it thematizes. That this trend was so short-lived—many, including Tsui himself, returned to Hong Kong after just a few years working stateside and failing to get a foothold in Hollywood—is unsurprising. It shows how, like fashion, flux itself is in flux, with globalized flow being as prone to open doors as it is to move on to the next big thing.
Knock Off (Tsui Hark, 1998).
The film closes with water as well. Following a climax set aboard a seawater-slick cargo ship, on which combatants slide around like hockey pucks, the final scene takes place on the shores of the Victoria Harbour as fireworks light up the night sky, celebrating the just-completed Handover. Here, the film seems to get as close to reality as a fictional work can: it references a widely publicized historical event that materially impacted numerous lives and, at the time of the film’s release, would have been prominent in many viewers’ minds. And yet, the images are idealized, beautiful but generic, emulating the way the Handover was covered by international media—highlighting the glitz and fanfare, rather than the nuances of the historical ramifications.
And so, we return to the water, to the flow of unmoored, commodified images and imitations, to movement as alpha and omega. A quarter of a century later, as the pace of the world continues to quicken and the prospect of global catastrophe looms once more, Knock Off feels like not only a time capsule but also a prophecy, a transmission from the past that still resonates with the instabilities of the present.