Jean Claude Van Damme, Tsui Hark, and Rob Schneider(!) team up for action in the absurd KNOCK OFF, on Blu-ray from 88 Films.

Marcus Ray (Van Damme) is the "king of the knockoffs" in Hong Kong's market district but he has "gone straight" by partnering with mover-and-shaker Tommy Hendricks (Schneider) running the Chinese manufacturing arm of American top brand V6 Jeans. Participating in the annual Hong Kong Marketing Association charity rickshaw race, Marcus gets caught up in a gunfight when he sees his adoptive brother Eddie Wang (Wyman Wong) abducted by Russian criminals. Eddie gets away in the aftermath, but Marcus and Tommy are arrested and become of interest not only to Detective Han (Michael Wong, CITY HUNTER) who has been pursuing the perpetrators but also V6 executive Karen Lee (Lela Rochon, GANG-RELATED) who has discovered that half of the last shipment of jeans to the United States were cheap knock-offs and believes Marcus and Tommy are either involved or dupes. When Marcus and Tommy accompany Han and Karen to a raid on a warehouse manufacturing the counterfeits, they arrive just as it explodes and Marcus gives chase after the men he recognizes as Eddie's kidnappers only to learn from CIA agent Johanson (Paul Sorvino, GOODFELLAS) that they are former Russian KGB agents who have developed watch battery-sized remotely-detonated nanobombs that they are planning to use against the U.S. by implanting them various Chinese knockoff products that will soon flood the market and they believe that Eddie is involved since his name was on the warehouse lease. As Marcus tries to prove his brother's innocence, he exposes various double- and triple-crosses among those involved in the investigation and discovers that V6's own jeans are among the product fitted with explosive accessories.

A co-production between director Tsui Hark's Film Workshop company and the successor companies of producer Mark Damon (THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER) and Trans World Entertainment and Imperial Entertainment (the company behind early Van Damme vehicles starting with BLACK EAGLE), KNOCK-OFF as an Van Damme/Hong Kong action hybrid vehicle would seem to be a winning combination. The action sequences are exhilarating as ever – with the loose safety regulations of the HK film industry allowing for some perilous stunts – but the film is just so sloppily-constructed that it seems to take a long time for the story threads to converge, and Schneider and a comatose Sorvino seem to get more screen time than the supporting cast of HK film personalities. A troubled production, a combination of funds running out and the hasty rewriting of the script – attributed to Steven E. de Souza of the 48 HRS. and DIE HARD franchises – resulted in the film's choice of setting the film during Britain's 1997 hand-off of Hong Kong back to China being less relevant to the plot than the same year's other HK/American action comedy hybrid RUSH HOUR with Jackie Chan and Chris Rock.

Coming out at the dawn of the DVD era, KNOCK-OFF had both laserdisc and DVD releases from Columbia Tri-Star but was one of the 88 Films Van Damme releases so far not to have had a stateside Blu-ray release (only reissued in a pair of multi-film Mill Creek DVD sets, at least one of which had a non-anamorphic widescreen transfer despite Columbia Tri-Star's DVD featuring an anamorphic transfer); although the Region B 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-ray likely comes from an HD master Sony prepared around the same time as the others. This is one of those unfortunate nineties productions where the HD resolution reveals the mismatch between the depth of the live action footage and the flatness of some quite poor (by American standards but not that much worse than some examples in late nineties HK films) CGI work. Audio commentary participants Mike Leeder and Arne Venema mention seeing various versions in which the CGI flames ranged from green to orange to red, but this HD master seems faithful to the original intent as a news report following one of the explosions notes the green flames. The Dolby Digital mix is presented here in lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and is fairly active in the surrounds while the scoring and song selections always sound a bit lower in the mix (particularly the theme song) and some of Schneider's ADR voicing in the opening location scenes almost sounds like a poor dub (although it may have more to do with the rushed post-production and the actor's inexperience looping his semi-improvised performance). As with the DVD releases of the film, Russian dialogue is subtitled on the screen while some incidental Cantonese dialogue that once went untranslated is translated here in the English HoH subtitles.

Action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema who have appeared on other 88 Films HK action and martial arts titles provide an audio commentary in which Leeder reveals that he got fired early on in the film's production but was allowed to hang around on the set while Venema provides some background on Hong Kong's real knock-off industry (having worked in the country's fashion industry early on in his career). They note the changes to the script, including those that came as a result of Wong replacing Jet Li at the last moment when the latter took a role in LETHAL WEAPON 4, the film's troubled shoot which included multiple injuries during the rickshaw race, and a rundown of the various martial arts actors in the supporting cast as well as the many Western expat stunt performers in the cast.