Review: The Lookalike

5th December 2014

By Ben Hooper.

Contains violence, strong language, scenes of a sexual nature, and mullets that some viewers may find disturbing.

Opening on an aerial shot of a neon New Orleans to an 80s synth-pop soundtrack like a cheap Drive knock-off, The Lookalike swiftly descends into an orgy of coke, strippers, and the botoxed cheekbones of That Guy From Stand By Me (Jerry O’Connell). From here we slide into a sleazy story of two brothers (O’Connell and Justin Long) entangled with two greasy gangsters, who are on the hunt for a lookalike woman to replace the prostitute they accidentally killed with a chandelier, to use as a honeypot for a drug deal.

The aforementioned hoodlums, played by That Guy From Sex and the City (John Corbett) and That Other Guy From Scarface (Steven Bauer) are full of charming remarks like “There are a lot of vaginas on my to-do list, but hers ain’t one of them.” It’s a symptom of an ugly, witless script.

While most of the characters appear to have been cut out of a cereal box and acted by alums of The Asylum’s back catalogue, Long’s conflicted half of the drug-dealing brothers at least displays some naïve charm in his flustered attempts to dig himself out of his hole, while maintaining a veneer of nerdy earnestness (“You wanna get hopped up on a Friday night, and I hear Columbian children crying.”) Kudos also to Scottie Thompson’s half-decent handling of her overcooked, cancer-riddled cocktail waitress, who brings the only the real surprise and emotional depth to this dated and derivative crime thriller.

The film does attempt to make a point of sorts, maybe about the duality of man and the interchangeability of women in this misogynist patriarchy, but the message is almost lost amidst bad direction and worse writing, which seem hell-bent on sending The Lookalike straight to DVD, destined for the bottom shelf of your local Tesco.

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