Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 6:2	Budget Studio

What could be better than a movie with Ali Landry as the main character? Of course, a movie where she plays two main characters!

The movie opens with some shots of a college campus and some guy whining about not being able to find true love. Soon we find out that the whiner is our male lead (though I use that term loosely). Turns out that Max is slaving away on a project that a professor is taking all the credit for. There is a big science conference coming up where the professor wants to debut the new cloning device, but it is not quite ready for prime time. Max meets the girl of his dreams (and the dreams of several million other guys) and accidentally clones her. Boy, I wish I had a nickel for every time that has happened to me. As the clone is a tabula rasa, our heroes decide to teach her guy stuff like video games, sports, pizza, beer and pornos. Needless to say, once they have created the perfect woman they are unhappy with her. Eventually the two Kates meet and help Max and Henry gain the credit they deserve for their work.

First of all, this is a perfect role for Ali Landry. She is gorgeous enough for the reporter but also athletic enough to look right for the clone's more masculine character. After watching Jennifer Garner kick the shit out of guys who outweigh her by a couple hundred pounds, it is refreshing to see an actress who looks like she could inflict some damage. This does not mean that she looks like a man, she is just physically strong, apparently she was a gymnast and has run the Boston Marathon. As the movie is mostly light romantic comedy, it does not put any great strain on Ali's acting ability; she mostly has to look cute and say funny things. She succeeds in both.

The next given in a romantic comedy is that the male lead is either helpless with women or entirely too successful with women. The movie will then either show the loser getting the girl or show the player settling down. Needless to say in both cases, the male lead is invariably tall and handsome. In Repli-Kate, Max (James Roday) plays the guy who can't get a date despite looking like a male model. I always roll my eyes at this scenario, but Hollywood is right on this one. I do want to see good looking people struggling mightily to overcome the tiny obstacles that stand between them and True Love. Sure, unattractive people fall in love and have compelling stories every day, but I still would rather watch Ali Landry.

Despite the fact that Landry takes off her clothes a lot in this movie, we never really see her naked. There is one scene of her walking naked a couple hundred feet away and a few shots of her from the back and side and tons of shots of her in her underwear. I am not surprised by this, nudity by the lead actress in this type of movie is rare. It is not like they don't swear and talk about sex in very graphic terms so there was no attempt to go for a PG-13 here. Ali not showing her naughty bits is not disruptive because of a couple of factors. The biggest being that neither the director nor the story really called for extensive nudity. The partial nudity was effective enough to get the point across. This is a light romantic comedy and so any sex scene is not likely to be long and drawn out. Also the directed very wisely opted not to use stunt boobs. There is nothing quite so bad as when a director insists on nudity and when the actress won't do it, he brings in a body double. When Jane Fonda was filming "Coming Home" she originally opted for a body double. After she saw the results, she insisted they reshoot the scene and she did her own stunt work (so to speak) because the body double looked so bad. I am not comparing Repli-Kate to a movie like "Coming Home", there was not a single exploding rodent in "Coming Home" so no contest. But even in a B movie when there is a scene of a close up of an actress' face, then a close up of her lover's, then a shot of some random breasts, and then back to the actress, it is pretty annoying.

I am going to meander off topic here for a bit (yeah, like that is so unusual) and talk about actresses, image and nudity. It is nearly impossible to make it as a big name movie star if you are female. There just are not very many roles for actresses. In a lot of action movies there will be the good girl, maybe the bad girl and that's about it. The 2000 movie version of "Charlie's Angels" featured the three leads, a bad girl and almost no other speaking roles for women. It is tough to get any role in a major motion picture, so a lot of aspiring actresses turn to B movies. And here is where the the nudity versus image problem starts. Lets say a director is shooting a movie about a stripper and wants the best actress he can get. Well the best actress may not want to do the nude scenes. Sometimes the director will hire the actress and try to talk her into the nude scenes, but this usually causes a rift between them and destroys any trust they might have. This can lead to scenes where you clearly see the actress' breast are covered, only to then see an insert of a body double. Other times the actress will say she will do the nude scenes and then back out when the time comes. Lloyd Kaufman over at Troma got burned this way early in his career (1983's "The First Turn On") when after several days of shooting the lead insisted she would not go topless after all. Kaufman could not reshoot all the scenes with a new actress, so he filmed around it. But since then he always films the nude scenes first. Some actresses think their image will be tarnished if they do nude scenes and main stream directors won't hire them. This is probably less of a concern now then in the past. As I mentioned light romantic comedy heroines rarely do nude scenes, although they typically are nearly nude. Jessica Alba flirts with nude scenes in "Good Luck Chuck" and both the "Fantastic Four" movies to say nothing of the various magazine covers she has graced in her underwear. Seems to work for her, but Nicole Kidman (who has done many nude scenes) plays similar roles as well as in movies such as "Fur" which is fairly offbeat and more interesting than fluffy romantic comedies. That she has appeared nude in films has not hurt her career, but then she is a much more adventuresome actress than most.

So, anyway, where was I? Normally a clone is meant to be identical to the original. In many movies the clone might not even realize that they are not the original. Repli-Kate goes with the assumption that while you might be able to recreate the physical person, without the life experiences they would not be same. This is a key theme in "The Boys from Brazil" where clones of Hitler are created as infants and are put through a childhood with the same major events as Hitler to try to create a similar man. Other films like "Multiplicity" use a Xerox copier approach and make a clone with the life experiences intact. Seeing how the clones in Repli-Kate come out fully grown you would expect them to be of the Xerox variety, but as that would take away the major plot line, we get the blank slate type. However, the clone can absorb and assimilate data at an amazing rate. In a matter of hours Kate learns to speak, understand not only the basic rules of football but advanced strategy. In a couple of days, she goes from not knowing any better than to walk around naked to being able to hold her own in conversations. Pretty impressive and just in time for her to partake of a series of near miss encounters with the real Kate and several mistaken identity gags. There is even a mirror scene that is pretty deftly done. We know that the mirror is broken because we see the clerk pick up some pieces of it off the floor, but she never tells the characters about it. So when Kate and her clone emerge from their changing rooms, they walk over to the mirror take a quick look and then head back to their changing rooms unaware. Were I directing the film I don't think I could restrain myself from doing the "spot on the mirror gag" but that would require one of the girls to know that there is no mirror. Still we are talking about a movie where a CD tray is the key device in converting a few drops of blood to a full size clone, so I am not sure we need to be too concerned about reality here.

As usual in the "Careful of what you wish for" movies, once the boys get their perfect girl, she is not quite what they wanted after all. Lets start with the grad student who is perfecting a cloning device. I would think that single handedly creating an entirely new process this complex from scratch would take up all your time. But, apparently Max has enough spare time to indulge in drinking and watching enough sports to be current on them. It should also be noted that the house was neat and tidy. As for Kate's clone, we won't get into a discussion on why once the boys realized that she was learning at an astounding rate, they did not start in with the hard sciences to which they have dedicated their lives but instead limited her education to football, pizza, porn and beer. Suffice it to say that it would not advance the plot. So anyway, now we have a hot chick who not only watches sports but understands them, enjoys hanging out at home playing video games and drinking beer, and enjoys casual sex and the boys are flummoxed. Seriously, they think it is cool for about one day and then they are disgusted. Honestly I am at a bit of a loss on this one. Obviously this is just some "short hand" by the writer, we know how this is supposed to play out, so not a lot of time is spent on the details (or any furthering of Kate's clone's education). So in the end Max (being our hero) gets the real girl (the original) and his best friend Henry gets the inferior copy.

Still all in all this is a pretty good film. Landry does most of the heavy lifting with the guys largely just reacting to her antics. The movie moves along fairly well though it gets a little frantic at the final scenes at the convention. Most of the characters are treated well, except of course for Eugene Levy's Jonas Fromer who suffers the humiliation normally accorded the asshole boss in films.

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