"The Replacement Killers" is a movie about guns. The fact that there are people attached to these guns, using them to fire bullets into the bodies of other people, is ultimately secondary. What matters is that people don't kill people, guns do, and they do it about every five minutes in this movie.

I can't say I'm a big fan of the Hong Kong action school of filmmaking. "Killers" is my first exposure to this type of movie, and it's an Americanized version, at that. But from what I've seen in "The Replacement Killers," all these big-time Chinese action filmmakers are no more than an artsy-fartsy version of the NRA. I swear to you, guns get more close-ups in "The Replacement Killers" than people do. We see guns shooting people, without a glimpse at the person shooting the gun or the person that the gun is shooting. We see guns run out of ammo and click into inaction; then, we see guns being reloaded. Even when there is actual dialogue being spoken, the camera can't avoid snatching a quick glimpse of the gun hanging idly in the hand of the speaker. I have every confidence that Chow Yun-Fat's gun in "Killers" will be the next big thing in Hollywood. I heard it had its own trailer, and will be appearing on Leno next week.

What happens in "The Replacement Killers"? John Lee (Yun-Fat) is a bad-ass assassin who pussies out on killing a cop with a family for his evil crime-lord boss, so the evil crime-lord boss decrees that he must die. In his attempts to get the hell out of Dodge and save his family in China, he hooks up with Meg Coburn (Mira Sorvino), a big fan of the Cure who also makes fake passports. Meg gets wrapped up in the situation and soon finds herself fighting the evil crime- lord alongside her new buddy Lee. Ultimately, she convinces Lee to. . .aw, who gives a fuck? The bad guys die, the good guys live, and more bullets are fired than in both World Wars combined.

More-so than in any action movie released in a LONG time, the plot and characters in "The Replacement Killers" are both cheap excuses to stage elegantly choreographed gunfights. There's no reason to care about the bloodied victims in any of these gunfights, since there's no reason to care about the characters. Thus, the viewer can essentially sit back, detach his mind from the movie, and smirk at the kick-ass deaths without that icky guilt that comes when characters you're involved in are exterminated.

Luckily, the gunfights are bad-ass enough to merit many wicked smirks. For example, the climactic sequence in "Killers" pushes the boundaries of credibility in about ten different ways, and the body count is astronomical. But when Chow Yun-Fat is striding down that alley with like 400 handguns strapped to his body, just shooting and shooting and SHOOTING until everyone DIES, most red-blooded folks with an ounce of adrenaline in their bones will find themselves on the edge of their seats, even though the plot and characters still bite big-time. Is it all wildly implausible? Oh, yeah. But there's an adrenaline-pumped yet glossily detached style to all of it that makes "The Replacement Killers" oddly appealing.

If ya like GUNS, then see "The Replacement Killers." Many, many times. With my most sincere blessings. If not, then make sure you're in the mood for an utterly mindless and soulless jolt of adrenaline. This is definintely a kick-ass movie, but it doesn't come close to kicking either the heart or the mind.